New Work: Mark and Dave go shopping

Just finished of some illustrations for the lovely people at Umbrella Design.  A large part of the project consisted of character design which is always fun to do, my figures were to be based loosely on two real people Mark and Dave.  My illustrations are to feature in their blog a diary of adventures in travel and shopping. The Mark and Dave go shopping blog offers a unique perspective from the duo, tips on what to buy and where and a little culture too.

Dave left and Mark on the right.

These are two trendy guys and designing such happening fellows can always be a stretch when you don't consider yourself to be trendy having a much different definition of the word.  Thankfully however I got a nice run down of their likes and what they wear.

Let me introduce you to Dave…

Name: David, but all his mates call him Dave.

Age: 29 ish. He's kinda geeky, and wants to thought of as really cool... in fact beyond cool. Of course he isn’t, he is in fact a bit of a twat, but nice, really nice in a bloke sort of way. Likes women who have an oriental twist, but always keeps them at arms length. I call them 'mysterious girls', cos they drift in and out of his life and none of us ever actually meet them. We only know about them by the morning smile of his face!

Where he shops: Carnaby Street for trainers, Ted Baker for shirts, Urban Outfitters, and surprisingly, Acne, which is uber cool. Some vintage bits from Brick Lane and Spitalfields, especially sun glasses and picture frames.

Jeans: Cheap Monday 

Watch: Vintage

Boxers or commando: Calvin Klein Boxers

Interests: Cool pubs and restaurants with friends. Sunday league football, gym... only when necessary. Pop-up Art Galleries, street art, photography, gigs headlining up and coming bands, such as: The Black Keys, The Cribs, Twin Atlantic or The Maccabees.

Job: Graphic Designer 

Loves: Geeky gadgets

Favorite Drink: Great beer

Drives: No need, Dave lives in London, but would like a vintage Triumph.

Personal Head Space: Need to make a change and find stuff that inspires him! 

Dave as a finished illustration.

And now on to Mark…

Age: early 30’s, trapped in the wrong era, should have been born mid 1800's then could have been a poet riding an old bike round a village green, a romantic at heart, yeah I know, I am a twat!

Where I shop: Selfridges, Harvey Nichols and Fenwick Men’s, Diesel, Paul Smith. Some

Vintage bits from Notting Hill, especially furniture.

Jeans: Diesel

Watch: Tag

Boxers or commando: Diesel Boxers

Interests: Out door stuff, cycling, cricket. Love great coffee with mates on a Sunday morning. Play occasionally in a band and open mic nights with guitar. Sketching (belong to urban sketchers).

Bands: Keane, Band of Skulls, Muse, Paul Weller, Florence and The Machine, Elvis Costello

Job: Furniture Designer

Favorite Drink: G&T

Drives: BMW Motorbike

Personal Head Space: Looking for direction and want to go and see great stuff! Like Dave, I need some ideas to guide me to my next project in life, what ever that might be.

Mark in all his illustrated glory

As the blog progresses we get to see more how they both develop via the travels and adventures in shopping they have.  

Mark and Dave's adventures in Brighton.

Good luck to Mark and Dave I hope they continue to trek around the country with their wallets ready and shopping bags full.  Visit Mark and Dave go Shopping blog here.

Go to my website for more illustrations.

 

Starting the Day

I don’t have to commute to work, I’m quite lucky in that regard.   I still feel I need to get out and do something before I start work so instead of a lengthy commute I go walking the dog with my wife after breakfast in the rain or shine or like this week in the freezing cold fully wrapped up with layers of clothing that take ages to peel off again. The walk helps wake me up, gets my mind and body functioning again, especially useful on the mornings when it feels like I hardly slept at all.  

I used to be a morning person, a fact that I’d forgot until my wife reminded me of recently.  Somewhere down the line my factory setting seems to have fallen into disrepair, replaced by grouch overdrive mode that seems to be my current default.  Some mornings it can be hard shaking off the sleepy head, If I’m still not awake after my morning regime and my head feels like it’s running some sort of start-up check complete with virus scan I try to reboot by visiting the local deli to get the best coffee in town.  If I haven’t booted up sufficiently I will indulge myself in the delight that is bacon roll with red sauce and a good strong coffee.  This I might remind you would be a second breakfast, a feeding regime that the hobbits of the shire would certainly approve of.

It’s a fine place and one that I often frequent, a  ritual of waking that will get my creative mind going if first breakfast and walkies don’t cut it.  I get that necessary social interaction and people spotting that is sometimes missing from my day.  I enjoy that little bit of small talk, asking about the day ahead, passing the same people walking to work or getting the paper, saying hello and chewing the fat before work calls.

The Scottish Deli is a little place that helps me wake up and serves me my second breakfast when needed.  It offers lots of foodie delights that will brighten up your fridge, store cupboard and eventually your dining table.

The Scottish Deli, Pitlochry. Click for website here

Just for fun!

Another self initiated illustration, my take on a poster for the film Drive.  Rendered in pen and ink this illustration was just for a bit of fun and a little diversion from my usual projects I hope you likely.

The rough-work below shows the development of the image, I've taken three images to show though their was lots of other bits an pieces to work on to flesh the illustration out.  

A series of sketches showing the  poster development.

Finished poster!

Visit my website to see more.

Or follow me on Facebook.

Recent projects

I’ve been fortunate to work with a great deal of talented people, producing images for advertising Children’s book illustrations, Educational illustrations, Comic book artwork, Storyboard and conceptual art for television, web, client pitch images and even illustrated maps! 

Thorpe Park 2009-Present  Large artwork for the amusement park’s on site map both display and carry fold out version.  The challenge was the fit in all the rides and buildings in a way that you could see the dramatic scale of the main rides and still be used as a functioning map.  The park is always being updated with new rides so the illustration needs to keep up with the new developments. Client LMC Design, London

From project brief to final artwork, I hope to impress and do my best, communicating my ideas discussing with you the most interesting way to turn your brief to an exciting visual. Collaboratively we can develop sketches and I will send those concepts on for your input, to help push the image forward to the final artwork.

My work is all rendered in pen and ink, my line art illustrations have evolved and developed as I’ve improved my craft.  When the ink is dry the final artwork is scanned, colored and tweaked, images can be vectored or saved to the file format you need.

It’s fantastic to see my work in context and I get a great deal of enjoyment seeing it in print.  For over a year on a weekly basis I contributed illustrations for The Guardian Newspapers Saturday edition.  My work has appeared in the London Underground and on Billboard posters in Italy for Piaggio’s urban scooter campaign , Artwork for Aids awareness literature in New York for HB4 Chelsea and recently an illustrated story, The Girl With Green Eyes for Oxford University Press aimed at an older readership to name but a few examples. 

The Girl With Green Eyes, 2011 For Oxford University Press’s Bookworms series, the above shows two images taken from the main location of the book, seven images in total featured this setting.  The challenge was to show the main characters in the same place but from different angles to keep the visuals interesting.

Recently I was fortunate to work on a project for the Northern Ireland Chamber Of Commerce (NICC), producing illustrations for their 230^th Anniversary brochure.  The brief required me to research on the developments in science, business and industry in Northern Ireland over the past 230 years to render interesting visuals to sit with and compliment the brochure’s copy.

Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce Interior artworks (NICC) 2012 A selection of interior artwork for the NICC 230 brochure, expanding on the history and innovation the Chamber has passed through and helped influence.  Interior artwork needed to blend around the copy hence the rough edges and sat on the page couter edges.  Brochure Design by Pink Inc, Belfast.

Double page art for the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce (NICC), 2012  Interior cover imaged for the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce’s 230 brochure.  The artwork was to show the progression of Belfast from NICC’s foundation 230 years ago to present day.

Please get in touch if you would like to find out more, 

visit http://www.dylangibsonillustration.co.uk

A Matter of Perspective

As an illustrator I find it important to get an impression of depth and movement in my artwork using perspective.  In the context of vision and how we view the world and the objects around us it is the way things appear to the eye based on their positions and sizes. Close things appear bigger in relation to the same object placed further away.  As objects become more distant they appear smaller due to the decrease in the objects visual angle.  A good example of this is a road or parallel rain tracks they appeal to meet at a distant point, referred to as the vanishing point, this point is called the horizon line or geometric horizon at the level of the viewer’s eyes.  While typing this I was suddenly struck by a memory of a sunny afternoon in my school art classroom, where it was first explained to me.  I’m sure most people can remember doodling the horizon lines and box houses vanishing into the distance similar to the example of the vanishing road or track.

Going, going, gone, this image is a classic example of perspective with one vanishing point.

It is understood that the Greeks were not the first to appreciate perspective when scholars wondered for example why a hand seemed to change size when it moves the honor goes to a fellow called Alhazen a mathematician who lived over a thousand years ago he realized that the cone of rays or light reflected of the hand grows narrower when moved away and larger when closer.  A much more recent and jokey way of looking at this perception was the scene in Father Ted when Ted bored and stuck in a caravan with Dougal tries to explain the difference between a small toy cow and the real ones further away outside the window.  “Ok one last time! These ones are small but those ones are far way.  Small…far away”.

The practice of using perspective was dusted off after largely being forgotten, resurrected in Florence, developed by renaissance artists, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci (not the Teenage turtles characters)  They developed their craft using multiple vanishing points to build up a three dimensional image on a flat canvas.   The rediscovered science of perspective  created a lot of excitement in the art world the marriage of the image and mathematics revived the composition of an artwork the new aim to not only make figures lifelike but to create a sense of movement of people in the space around them.  The practitioners had moved away from the artist as a recorder of an event to capturing the movement of the scene.  Creating grids on a canvas to precisely create the perspective of the 3D world, objects would be drawn out before painted in a wire frame way.  The same way that today’s computer artists build the characters and settings in computer animation or CGI.

Leonardo da Vinci's Study for the Adoration of the Magi, note the perspective lines and vanishing points.

Paleo Uccello and his Perspective Study of a Chalice created circa 1450.   A wire frame drawing  similar to the  way  a computer artist creates a wire frame model in which to paint and add detail to.

Once you get the hang of perspective and can figure out the logic behind how it works it you can do it more intuitively when sketching out an image.  As with anything one you nail down the basics of it you can have fun with it and distort it in what’s called forced perspective.  You can affect the appearance of things in a drawing, exaggerating the size of something to appear bigger or smaller than it actually is.   This is something I like to get into my images whether it’s in children’s illustrations or for publishing and advertising artworks.  The trick is to fool the eye and draw attention to certain details, helpful in my educational artworks as there is a small artwork space to work with and you might need a character hold something and see what it is but also include the detail of a room and people behind him.  So I would use this distortion effect to pull out this person and distort the size of the hand and the object to appeal closer up.  Seeing is believing, you have to get this just right or the brain will recognize the fakery and disengage from the image.

In Parkour I've shown an aerial view with the city sprawling off into the distance.

This distortion is used to amazing effect in Leon Keer’s art he produces street images on flat surfaces such as paths or sidewalks.  Drawn in chalk and then coloured, wonderful 3D images when viewed in the right position appear to leap out at you from their flat surroundings.  From standing at another position they appear smudged or distorted and the illusion is gone.  Using the same techniques as the early practitioners in Renaissance Italy, Leon and his contempories create these incredible visual feasts.

Going up! Leon Keer and one of his creations.

My math’s teacher always bemoaned my lack of ability in class I like to think that my understanding the art of perspective and putting it into practice I’m solving mathematical problems every day.

A little help refresh those memories of lessons can be found in this how to guide. http://www.wikihow.com/Draw-Perspective

Or a good reference for kids is How to Draw Comics “Marvel” Way by Stan Lee.  I still have my own aged and well thumbed through copy on my book shelves

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If you would like to read a little more about this try The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski a great book that covers art and mathematics and the development of the human mind and scientific progress.

Dylan Gibson Illustration

“Hi Don, good morning, pleasure to meet you”.

It was a pleasant greeting from my first prospective client, though considering my name is Dylan, not the best of introductions. During the firm and lengthy handshake that followed I tried to correct the error, he dropped his hand to his side and retorted “Well that’s what it says in my diary” It was an awkward moment, I was eager to make a good first impression and show my illustration portfolio.

I’m a freelance illustrator based in the UK specialising in pen and ink artwork. Originally from Northern Ireland and now based in Scotland, I have been self employed for over ten years. I enjoy what I do and I’ve been lucky enough to turn something I’m good at into a job.

I've been fortunate to work with some of the leading design, media and publishing houses across the UK and further afield.  Previous projects have included: artwork for advertising, books and book covers, character design, comics, conceptual art, educational publishing, newspaper and magazine feature artwork and covers, storyboards and narrative work for television and animated shorts.

I’m used to visualizing my thoughts and ideas on paper, putting them into words in this blog presents a new challenge, one I hope will be interesting for the reader.  I hope to talk about what I do, give you details on how I compose an illustration, my influences, share my experiences and hopefully offer advice to  those interested in art or hoping to start off in a similar career. 

 After convincing the client of my identity, my first meeting went well; we had a joke about it and laughed.  As this is my first post  I hope to get things off to a good start.

Thanks for visiting,

Dylan Gibson 

Dylan Gibson Illustration