posted: January 17, 2012

 The fun-o-gator lives! Last Autumn I was invited by Holt Community Primary school to design the new playground markings for the infants building and as winter term wound up, the fun-o-gator was unleashed.
Since my girls began pre-school in Italy I’ve been lucky enough to have been invited in to their schools to hold talks, workshops, and work with the kids designing sets and murals.  Holt CP is the girls new school in the UK, a great little school with a fantastic teaching staff and thank my lucky stars they too share that all important love for art.

I was given an open brief on the design and managed to source a great local team to paint it out. Road Art Ltd are due a big thanks. Apart from hand painting out their most complex design to date they battled good against the British weather to deliver on time. And thanks too for having me stand over you and check the colour mixing. You gotta suffer for your art man, the green was worth it in the end.

I chose a friendly alligator, a civilised monster as the body of the design in and around which is an educational play area incorporating a calculator section in the teeth, alphabet spines, noughts & crosses, hopscotch, jump lines, duck duck goose game, soccer dribbling game, target practice, running relay, and chalk drawing arena. The school symbol/mascot is an owl which  became the voice of the fun-o-gator with a dedicated chalk drawing area in his speech bubble.
 
There is a separate snail character leading the children in from the side gate with his snail trail, guiding them with his compass.

The playgournd was gridded out by Road Art and a chalk drawing of the design was laid down. Every shape of weather was thrown around as the design went down. Blow torches were used to prime the tarmac for dry painting which was abandoned a couple of times.

The green was hand mixed in one batch and the whole fun-o-gator needed to be laid down in one go to avoid mis-mixing another day if rained off. Weather stopped play just as the final green was laid.

Thermoplastic road paint has a lovely tactile quality when dried, like cake icing or very thick, old oil paint. As the paint hardens instantly the kids got to try out the new fun-o-gator at home time. And the sun finally came out for us.

A few days after the fun-o-gator was finished I was invited in by the school for the grand opening. I cut the ribbon with my two girls and the infants classes presented me with cards, messages, and a portfolio of drawings of the fun-o-gator. It was very moving.
This was a voluntary project, and the money for the painting was raised by a small group of mums who'd organised and run fundraising projects throughout the year. It's been a real privilege working on this project and I would strongly recommend to any other illustrators a little time put aside to offer school children an insight into the world of illustration. It's a language children are familiar with, have incredible enthusiasm and talent for,  and one that sadly tends to be lost as they grow older. There was one little boy though who drew me a picture and at the bottom wrote 'Thanks for the playground, it's rubbish'. I look forward to making amends next time around.

posted: November 17, 2011

 I’ve worked for several years with California based fashion label Tookata People and my favourite project to date was a collaboration with Mattel celebrating Barbie’s 50th year. I was asked to interpret Barbie’s iconic black and white swimsuit look of 1959 for a line of apparel, accessories, and jewelry for their spring/summer 2009 collection.  Some images here. I followed up with another season of Barbie interpreting a 1980’s disco Barbie which was even more girlie fun. After Barbie I was approached to work on another Mattel property Hotwheels. I had no end of Hotwheels as a kid. My favourite one I lost down a mousehole whilst killng ants with a magnifying glass at primary school. Now was my chance to put things right, do good and finally overcome my loss.

I initially pitched some style reference to Mattel from a job i’d done for another fashion label. This piece was inspired by a Big Daddy Roth car and I’d slipped a Johnny Ramone type character in the driving seat.
The style pack from Mattel pointed more towards a contemporary urban/graffiti look, and although a great look for their target age range the Tookata line was aimed at a slightly different demographic. I wanted the artwork to send out a few vintage signals, side step slightly the urban cool that I don’t think my work is suited to and reference the more raw, hand made feel of vintage hot rod culture. With the obligatory monster. Mattel were fantastic. We went through several rounds of sketching and settled on a rat character. Mattel had supplied a stock of vintage cars to choose from and having chosen the ‘Rat Bomb’ I just had to go rat.

The artwork was to be applied across a line of apparel and accessories in a range of sizes. I wanted the detail to hold up enough in the smaller reproductions and remain interesting but also offer enough on a larger scale. I scanned in some heavy handed spray painting and made up some photoshop brushes to add texture to the  bold shapes of the background. The artwork was to sit alone on a plain background and I wanted it to sit comfortably and have a presence, not float around and look unsettled. I used the flat colours of the race loop and city to act as middle ground between the plain background and the detailed character and bled them out with the spray brushes to resemble a graffiti stencil.

posted: November 2, 2011

  I recently had the pleasure of working with London agency St Lukes, who as well as producing these well worth seeing campaigns, hold the Toby Carvery account. Toby Carveries are a UK nationwide chain of carveries who promote a traditional family dining experience 7 days a week centred around the roast dinner. They wanted to inject a little fun into the dining experience of the younger customer and St Lukes came up with the idea of 'The Tobies' vegetable family. 'Dysfunctional yet wholesome' was to be the genetic imprint of the Toby family, which incidentally i’m keeping as my new slogan.
 

An A3 poster was used instore to introduce the Toby family and the theme was ‘an awkward family photo’. Yes, the Google research for this one was disturbing. Six vegetables were chosen to best represent the Toby dining experience, old grandma onion was my favourite to work on. The solid round shape meant little definition between the head and body, giving her a child like quality to play around with. Other ingredients include - one neurotic mother, one dud dad, one boisterious broccoli, an emotional parsnip and a screaming pea. The main indredient uniting this discordant vegetalbe stew is the wholesome colour palette of the Toby Carvery brand.

The online collateral was handled by The Allotment Agency and was headed by the creation of an online funzone with kids activities and their wonderful art competition. I've kindly been sent some of the entries to the art competition to post here, the winner is still pending....who'd want to judge these little gems. I love them all!

posted: May 5, 2011

DeAgostini, the Italian publishing house and DeAkids, their kids TV channel have just entered the ipad app market and I was really appy to be asked to work on their first app with the super talented team over at Mutado. Last year I worked with Mutado on an animated short for Custo Barcelona and it was a marriage made in heaven, so grazie mille for the invite to the honeymoon.

All Together is all about rounding up roaming individual creatures by enclosing them within a shape drawn on the screen with a finger. There are 3 different landscapes to choose from - sky, land, and sea and each landscape has it’s own unique inhabitants.Ther are 3 levels to each landscape so 9 environments in total and the game is aimed at kids of all ages 4 + with 3 difficulty levels. That’s the skinny on the technical.

DeAKids - ALL TOGETHER - PROMO from Mutado on Vimeo.
 

DeAKids - ALL TOGETHER DEMO eng from Mutado on Vimeo.

For the look we wanted to build on the characters and feel I’d developed for the animated Custo short. Simple, bright, positive, fun characters in a friendly environment. Whilst the film was limited to 2D flat colour I wanted to take the images further in the game and give them a gummy, gel feel with tone, glossy highlights and a chubbier, bouncier feel. The landscapes needed to be sparse with large open spaces to allow the characters free movement and not confuse gameplay so are very graphic and simple. The furniture is pushed towards the screen boundary to frame the gameplay. All colours were tested on the ipad as we went along to make the most of the ipads colour repro to push the contrasts and add dimension.


 

I wanted the logo to include a suggestion of the gameplay concept and was lucky that the word TOGETHER consists of an even number of letters so paired them off using the four main character colours and pushed the gel/gum rendering.