While I'm on a hiatus due to deadlines, here's some more work for Wingspan magazine....
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| A Silent Disco is shut down by the mayor of Salzburg for being too loud. |
Yes, that's a self-portrait behind the turntables... well I couldn't resist.
Here's some more of my regular monthly cut illustrations for Wingspan, ANA's inflight magazine on their international flights.
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| A story about a wild boar in Australia that went on a rampage after swigging 18 cans of beer. |
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| Nepal's Bird man Gautam Sapkota, world record holder for his ability to mimic 151 species of bird |
More to come!
I've been shamefully behind with my blog this year, chiefly because I've been pretty well overwhelmed by some very involved book deadlines, things have been extremely hectic! It's not over yet, things are still very busy, but I'll post again when things get easier.
It looks to be another hot summer, so here's a splash of cold water - another recent illustration for ANA's inflight magazine Wingspan.
It's to illustrate a piece about the opening of the world's biggest waterslide, the
Verruckt in Kansas City in the USA, which was supposed to open in May. The drop is 168 feet, longer than falling of Niagara Falls, at up to 65 mph. Apparently the opening has been twice delayed, but now, finally, is happening,
tomorrow!
Sounds exciting? Can't wait to try the jump? Off you go then, I think I'll just watch.
Those who've been following my antics for a while may remember I draw a regular monthly comic illustration for Japanese airline ANA's inflight magazine Wingspan. Here's a recent selection with links to the article themes.
The illustrations accompany short news snippets collected from around the world, unbelievable-but-true nuggets from the obscure depths of journalism, they're always fun to draw because the topics are invariably oddball and sometimes bizarre.
I love to explore visual ideas, so when I receive the brief I send the designer a selection of sketches to choose from. I like to explore fantasy and surrealism, but for this series the stories are often odd enough in themselves they don't need much embellishment, I'm under instructions to play it straight for the most part.
Although I work a lot with Photoshop I wouldn't call myself a digital-expert illustrator by any standards, I prefer to hinge my drawings on hand drawn pen lines and keep the pixel-manipulation simple and minimum. One of the most satisfying things about creating these drawings is that they allow me to explore textures and colour schemes within the parameters of my style.
Since beginning this series I've learned a lot about the human world, this is indeed a remarkable planet we live on!
In the meantime and in an altogether different vein, here are some more of the small regular monthly cuts I do for Japanese airline ANA's inflight magazine Wingspan.
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| The Calcio Storico festival in Florence, Italy |
Every issue the magazine runs a short nugget feature covering the weird and unusual things that happen around the world. Often they're very amusing subjects and a lot of fun to draw. However the drawings themselves are always gentle observations, not outright humour.
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| Hong Kong - A ship-shaped department store |
Unlike my more detailed children's books, which are created on watercolour paper, for this kind of work I draw on a coated paper which results in a strong expressive pen line, a style I first developed for posters and other graphic work in Japan.
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| A Hotel in France where guests can live like hamsters |
The drawings are scanned in, often assembled from several elements, cleaned up and then coloured digitally, sometimes using textures. I love the flexibility that this offers.
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| A restaurant in an Italian prison, where inmates serve the customers |
I particularly enjoy this kind of work because it allows me to play around on the computer and explore graphic simplicity, though I don't regard myself as a "digital artist", everything still rests on a hand-crafted pen and ink drawing.
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| A restaurant in China run entirely by robots |
My children's books are created almost entirely by traditional non-digital means which gives a natural resonance, but in these illustrations the stronger line and digital colouring provides a more dynamic graphic edge. This style of work appears to be unconnected to my pen and watercolour children's books, but in fact they both come from exactly the same pen, it's just the paper and colouring that's different. Just varied facets of the same realm.
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| The latest issue talks about a Ski Festival of Witches in Switzerland |
By: John Shelley,
on 6/6/2015
