Open City - London Documentary Film Festival

Over the past few weeks I've been busy working on illustration and design for a new London Documentary Film Festival - OPEN CITY. The project has involved creating a whole series of illustrations which represent the different aspects of the festival. For the poster the different elements were collaged together to create a composite image suggestive of the festival bursting out of the city. There were a few different iterations of design (images below) before reaching the finalised design (image above). It's been a really fun job to work on so far and there is still a lot more work to do!

Women's Health and Family Services

I've just completed this commission from women's health and family services. The subject of all of the illustrations in this little book are the different locations in Tower Hamlets where breast feeding is welcome.

PES

Silhouettes and Shadows

I find myself drawn to silhouette imagery. I've been watching lots of Lotte Reiniger's cut-paper stop motion animations recently. The images above are from her 1922 animation of the classic fairy tale "Cinderella". I've become a big fan of hers since I saw a screening of 'The adventures of Prince Achmed" in the Barbican a couple of years ago. It's astonishing to think this was made over 80 years ago. It still looks so fresh and inventive. The visual economy imposed by this form of animation accentuates the charm and elegance of her figures.

The shadow's and silhouettes in Reiniger's work reminded me of the Shadow Catchers Exhibition I saw last month at the V&A. Floris Neusüss' life sized photograms were my personal highlight from the show. His figures are ethereal beings which inhabit a dream world somewhere between waking and sleeping. There are so many wonderful textures in these images with some areas of the figure appearing pin sharp whilst other parts are corrupted and abraded.

Howl (a blast from the past)

I went to see the film Howl in the cinema a couple of nights ago. The poem is so powerful I was interested to see how it would be portrayed visually. The movie was a combination of film and animation. Personally I wasn't super keen on the animation. I guess when you read a poem or a piece of prose you build a picture in your own mind of how it looks. Often when written work is translated into another form it doesn't look how you'd imagined.

A couple of year ago I'd did this series of illustrations based on Howl as a personal project. The images refer mainly to the first few lines of the poem:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat

up smoking in the supernatural darkness of

cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities

contemplating jazz..."

Inspiring stuff - Joanna Neborsky & Demetrios Psillos

I was recently gifted a beautifully designed book entitled 'Three Line Novels' written by Felix Feneon and fantastically illustrated by Joanna Neborsky. I love her work, it's so lively and free with a really nice mix of collage and drawing.

Demetrios Psillos is another illustrator I recently came across who's work I admire, in particular his portraits.

Physical Apps

I thought this was a really charming piece of animation by a group of second year BA design students at Goldsmiths - Henry Flitton, Harriet McDougall, Chris Thomas and Ben Redford. They've physically illustrated the virtual applications of Twitter, Facebook and Spotify.

Physical Apps. from Harriet McDougall on Vimeo.