Happy New Year Everyone

So ends 2012, we’ve had our ups and we’ve had our downs, and I hope they overall it’s been a good year for you.

It’s been pretty good over here I’m happy to say, and now it’s time to do a few new year tasks like backing up all my images again (oh how they’re growing!), get my accounts up to date, look forward at what my plans are for 2013 and what business targets are achievable, and also look back at 2012. See where I went wrong, see where I went right.

I’ve had some great fun this last year, some pretty interesting commissions, like the shotgun box packaging marketed towards female hunters, or the lovely and colourful mango lassi recipe which was amazingly fun to design, I’ve done some portraits for an assortment of people, designed a wicked search engine for Waxamomo and created some fab steampunk cats.

If I had to choose, and I don’t have to but I’m going to anyway, I think one of my favourite commissions this year was the one I got from Protect Your Bubble, partly because it was quirky and fun and but also partly because it was my first commission for a really big company, they’ve been on the telly and everything!

So here’s the link to my illustrations on their website, now I’m going to go do a happy dance and sing Auld Lang Syne.

Happy New Year Everyone!!

http://ukblog.protectyourbubble.com/news/page/2/

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The Satisfaction Of A Job Well Done.

Ah, bliss. I’ve ticked off another job from my noticeboard, I’m dividing my time now between making relevant amendments to the job I’ve got in progress (as and when the client requires it) and also the same-old, same-old work hunting type of thing I normally do.

The job I’ve just completed was for HeatCool, which is a Chicago based air conditioning company. You don’t really get that over here, air conditioning. I mean, obviously it must exist, I’m sure I’ve been in some shops and felt blasts of cold air that weren’t coming from the front entrance. It’s just not as prevalent over in this country as it is in the states.

It’s almost like a strange reverse world, or at least it was when I was over there. I was in a hot southern state and everywhere was fitted with a/c units, you’d walk past the open doorway of a shop and be suddenly struck by an Arctic blast, it was bliss, temporarily providing respite in the blazing heat of the American day. It’s exactly the same in England, but in reverse! In this country you walk past an open shop doorway and they blast heat out at you, compelling you to stand still and attempt to thaw out your bones for long enough to perhaps be tempted inside. In America you actually catch yourself saying, “shut the door quickly, you’ll let the heat in!”

Well, I’m glad that HeatCool like their new advertising postcard, I certainly enjoyed putting it together. Although it was a long and interesting road, I’ve saved all the variations of it so I can watch it evolve. I shan’t bore you with the minutia of each variation in between the first draft and the final draft but suffice to say, it changed a lot from beginning to end.

First Draft

Final Draft

The brief initially was “pop-art” themed, hence why the first draft is very much in the pop art style. As I worked with the client and made amendments based on their requests the overall image changed somewhat until it ended with the final draft you see above. I think they’re both equally pleasing in their own way and now I know more about air conditioning units, pop art, Roy Liechtenstein and the city of Chicago.

Sweet Bles’sed Work!

It’s not all doom and gloom here at Knight Time Creation towers, no indeed. There are those beautiful moments when the scores of sent emails and the handfuls of potential replies turn into a sprinkling of actual jobs and oh what a feeling. It’s incomparably wonderful, the high is so glorious it makes it worth all of the desperately disappointing lows one has to go through to get to this point.

At the moment I’ve got a couple of jobs on, which is indescribably fantabulous, one of these jobs I’ve actually just completed and I’m really rather pleased with it. It’s for Appliances Online, who are bringing out a range (pardon the pun) of ovens (see…range…ovens…get it? Oh never mind.) Anyway, these oven people’s lovely new cookers are in a variety of colours, they’re called the Newworld Colour Collection and they’re pretty spiffy. Why do they need an illustrator, I pretend to hear you cry, well they’re putting together a Rainbow Cook Book, using the talents of 7 food writers and 7 illustrators each pair are given a colour of the rainbow and must write a recipe and illustrate that recipe between them.  Well, it was amazing fun. I stayed up most of the night working on the lovely Mango Lassi recipe I’d been given and the following day, it was complete and I’m very pleased.

Ahhh. *blissful sigh*

See, I don’t just complain and rant on here do I? No. So there.