Mapping the Tree of Life

Here's a recent cover illustration for the Natural History Museum's magazine Evolve for a feature on sequencing the DNA of every British species. The brief was to create a collection of various creatures within a tree design that referenced the DNA helix shape. The digital illustration was a collage of 3d designed helix tree trunk, animal photography and various sky/tree imagery layered and treated in Photoshop with a magic hour palette. Now, how to get them down from there?

Down For Whatever

Despite the lack of posts recently I'm glad to report it's been pretty busy for me during lockdown and whatever period of the pandemic we are currently in. A few illustrations and some chunky animation projects have kept me beavering away in my scrappy makeshift home office (aka the living room) such as this third video for Dutch producer Kilder's latest single Down For Whatever (featuring Friday Night Plans). After the first two mouth-centric videos we upped the ante and I had half of a face to work with. The singer, Friday Night Plans, supplied smartphone performance footage wearing a hat that obscured her eyes and created a striking look when treated for the video. The footage went into Cinema 4D and a 3d displacement map of the face was created that I could shade with light and texture and get the camera in close to capture interesting visual details. The performance was edited into an abstract sci-fi tinged environment with psychedelic 3d mountains and objects reacting to the music. All in all it was a blast to work on. You can see this and other Kilder videos here.