Raw Power Festival 2019

Here's a job I really enjoyed getting my teeth into recently, creating all the promotional material for a North London music event Raw Power Festival 2019. It's a festival I'm a fan and regular attendee of so was excited to tackle the relatively open brief from the promoter Baba Yaga's Hut. I saw it as a welcome opportunity to indulge my creative and musical leanings with the festival being a great showcase for 'the best psych heaviness, space rock, synth crazyness, left field electronica and much more'.

For the logo I looked for chunky typefaces to adapt into suitably psychedelic texture windows. The artwork came about after two flashes of inspiration, one of them retroactively. I modelled the central figure in 3d, initially thinking welding helmets and slinky robots and was reminded afterwards by my wife that it was probably all inspired by Jennifer Beals in Flashdance (1983). Probably. For the landscape I was thinking heavy-duty gig lighting and dry ice fog by way of Flash Gordon (1980) skies and strange floating droids.

Once the look was signed off I designed the posters announcing the partial and full festival line up then went to town animating a promo video in After Effects to the heavy strains of Gnod's Donovan's Daughter. I've included some of the promo stills here and a few of the initial poster designs beneath the finals to show the creative progress. You can also see the work on the site here with related work.

Barren Island

Here's a feature and spot illustration for a Hadassah Magazine extract from the 2018 Ribalow Prize winning novel 'Barren Island' by Carol Zoref. It's about an immigrant Jewish family growing up on Barren Shoal, a factory island in New York's Jamaica Bay, in the earlier half of the 20th century where the primary industry was rendering animal carcasses into glue and fertiliser. It's a very atmospheric read and I really enjoyed trying to capture the essence of it. You can see it on the site with previous work for Hadassah.

Poster Prize For Illustration 2019

Happy New Year to all! Just about kick-started my brain into gear for January so I'll open the 2019 blog chapter with some good news. Very pleased to have been accepted into this year's AOI Poster Prize for Illustration exhibition at the London Transport Museum opening on 8th February. The theme is 'London Stories' and, after racking my brains for an existing narrative to illustrate, I decided to go with one of my own personal experiences. This illustration, entitled 11/10/08, is a celebration of my wedding day on the London Eye to the woman I love in the city I love. Simples. You can see it on the site with previous Prize For Illustration entries here.