Drawings at La Grande Galerie de l'Évolution

Whilst in Paris I also did some drawings at La Grande Galerie de l'Évolution, part of Le Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. It is a beautiful building with very atmospheric lighting and stuffed (no pun intended) with great animals.

The Nursery Rhyme Project

I'm working on about eight projects at the moment. One of them is called Death and Treason, Rhyme and Reason and is an adult nursery rhyme musical show performing at Bristol Old Vic in December. The music is sounding gorgeous, you can keep up to date with the project on their Facebook page. I am making a series of large scale paintings for the show and doing some design work. You can book tickets here.

Fox

As we creep into May I'm coming to the end of some small projects and starting new big ones. In April I helped devise and performed in a scratch performance of Project Moon, by my long term collaborator Chris Collier (Artistic Director of the Wardrobe Theatre) and The Original Spinners clown dance troupe led by the brilliant Rachael Smith-James with fab music by Verity Standen. There were no photos from the show but here's an image by Becca Rose who helped with the shadow puppetry.

Moon by Becca Rose

I also shot a live-action film called The Watchmaker with Chris Collier which will be online soon. At the moment I'm working on album artwork for composer Kit Wilson and am developing an animated music video for a Bristol band. Yesterday was the first rehearsal of The Life After, the new show by the Bristol Old Vic Young Company which I am directing with Miranda Cromwell. We have a great team of around 20 creatives and a full cast of 100 young people. The show will take place on the main stage at Bristol Old Vic in August and is my directorial debut on that stage. More images and details about the live-action film and The Life After soon. In the meantime here's a fox I drew based on a poem by Emma Ward.

Biro, Bristol, May 2012

Bearded Man

The bearded man felt slightly lost,

as his feet crunched on the frost,

his face was long, his beard was red,

'Where are my gloves?' he softly said...

Pen and watercolour, Bristol, Feb 2012

Drawings

Words and Pictures

...and a comic

Flowers

Don't forget the mothers!

Twins

The siamese twins of the Green Meadows Circuis, Ohio, USA

Buildings

Architecture of the mind: drawings made whilst in a department meeting

Biro, Newport, Feb 2011

A Great Big Picture of You

Back in November five illustrators, including myself, took part in a project called A Great Big Picture of You. The piece was devised by a long-term collaborator of mine Chris Gylee, along with Kate Yedigaroff from Bristol Ferment, and was conceived for Bristol Jam festival of improvisation at the Bristol Old Vic theatre.

Illustration projects Chris and I have worked on in the past have followed rule-based systems to allow for peculiar creative occurrences and this project elaborated on similar concerns.

The Process: Twenty-five disposable cameras were given out to various people all around the city of Bristol and they were encouraged to fill the camera with whatever they wanted. The photos were developed and displayed ready for us illustrators who came in on the last day of the festival having not seen the photos until then. Armed with a photocopier and two colours of paint, our aim was to make an 8ft by 12ft collaborative illustration piece in response to the photographs and we had from dusk till dawn. The results can be seen below.

The piece in progress

Joseph Wallace, Chris Gylee and Philippa Thomas at work

Private View

The final piece

detail

detail

For more info on the project click here.

Illustrators: Chris Gylee, Joseph Roberts, Laurie Stansfield, Philippa Thomas, Joseph Wallace.

Filmmaker Benjie Croce made a time-lapse film of the process.

Time-lapse film © Benjie Croce 2010

Knock knock

News of the past few months coming soon. In the mean time, a postman!

Jason and Medea

A quick piece of pro-mo visualisation I did for Jason and Medea (working title) a new show from Bristol Old Vic Young Company, directed by Tid. The piece will be a large ensemble production and is currently in development. The treatment transposes the greek myth to the crooked underbelly of 1960s London.

Pencil and digital collage.

Fact

Illustrations

I've just done a few quick, little portraits of some of the Animation Sans Frontières participants for the new brochure. This is a course in Animation Production that I have recently completed. These illustrations were done over night and the others will be by Péter Vácz.

Animation Sans Frontières participants 2009-2010

Below is a bit of character design for a piece of puppet theatre for children I'm working on with Bristol-based artist of many talents Christopher Collier.

As you can see it's about Pirates and is currently in development.

Red Nose Studio

Having mentioned the genius of Red Nose Studio earlier I thought I would example Sickels creative process when making his work. There is a huge amount of information and insight into the way he works on his blog but I wanted to illustrate it here with a specific example. This is a cover for a magazine called Angie’s List.

From sketch to final image…(click to enlarge)
And here is a stop-motion-esque video documenting the set-up of the shot; adding all the possessions, creating the lighting, and adding details to the set.

I see the way Sickels works as being utterly relevant to the practice of a stop motion animator, I think videos like this one demonstrate really well what I call the ‘alchemy’ of what it is to create and shoot little worlds. There’s a time in the studio which is a constant play between, puppet, props, light, composition, shadow, staging and proxemics before filming takes place.
 All material © Red Nose Studio.