From the Lab

A roundup of recent experiments. These are personal pieces that I create when I need a bit of a creative kickstart.

Living in Isolation

February is a waiting game

Creative Mindset

Deadlines: before and after

Heavy Thinkers

I saw the movie 'Shape of Water' and I loved the machine aesthetic of the sets. I collect old technical journals and I mined the images for some heavy industrial drawings and got to work. I haven't had a lot of creative time recently, I just finished a major children's book project and a lot of editorial work.

Here are the images in the series, these are all two colour transparent images on an warm background. I really enjoyed working on these, and I kept the series rolling, longer than I would have anticipated. It's great to create flow and get swept up by an idea that carries you along. I don't know where I am going with this yet, I may be creating a series of riso prints. Stay tuned.

Test Run

Heavy Thinker #1

Positive Vibration

Data Miner

Troll

Maximum Productivity

Ad Infinitum

Now, where was I?

Trying to keep it all together this spring, super busy with so many things going on. Here's a peak inside my head and an update on some recent work.

These are illustrations from a recent cover assignment and feature for ProSales. I worked with art director Sarah Bell at Hanley Wood. It's all about getting the right combination of elements together to build leaders. So I ran with the conveyer belt/factory/industrial aesthetic. Fun stuff (for me, anyways!).

Here's another cover assignment, for Golfworld - Timothy Carr, art director. Now that the Masters is on, I thought it would be a good idea to post this golf-related piece. Love to do covers, and in this case, it's technology meeting sport. I added a little extraterrestrial twist as well, because the golfing universe was altered forever by this strange-looking device.

While I am on the topic of strange-looking devices, here's a little 'selfie' to end things. I submitted this to Pictoplasma, and it will be part of the portrait show in Berlin in May. Mecanismos on the move. Love it!

Machines making Machines

 I like to dabble in collage, building my own imaginary machines. I collect a lot of old technical catalogues and manuals, and see anthropomorphic images in the diagrams and objects. I don't keep a sketchbook, but I have a lot of open illustrator files, where I create new combinations and characters.

There is something fascinating about the click and whirr of analog technology. Springs, flywheels, gears and levers. A ticking clockwork or adding machine. There is also a romance built into fiction along the lines of H. G. Wells. I don't have the attention span to assemble and repurpose old machines, but I do like the aesthetic, and have dabbled with it in my Mecanismos series. These images are always evolving and have taken on a life of their own.

It's fun to take a technical story and incorporate these robots into the illustration. Here's a recent assignment for the Christian Science Monitor, about human error and mistakes made by officials in sports. Should we replace humans with machines in order to get the call right? Is it foolproof? Will it improve the game? It's your call.

Recent assignment for Hemispheres magazine above, about designers repurposing our modern technology with a steampunk aesthetic. Juicy topic!  Thanks to art director Claire Eckstrom, she was great to work with.

'Your worship is your furnaces

Which, like old idols, lost obscenes,

Have molten bowels, your visions is

Machines for making more machines.'

     - Gordon Bottomley (1912)