Keith Moon caricature

Keith Moon caricature for his 69th birthday.

Back page

This is what I wanted to do for today's back page. 

It was never going to sail. Had to pitch it though.

Edward Snowden exclusive

This has nothing to do with illustration or graphics but it was great to be at a paper when it broke a world exclusive story, or more to the point Lana Lam did.

Now the office is wondering who's going to play her in the upcoming Edward Snowden movie.

Threadless t-shirts

Have been entering some t-shirt designs to www.threadless.com

Some are general design but some are for specific competitions. Like this latest one. It's for a competition for the band The Flaming Lips and their new tune 'The Terror'. 

I was playing around with different ideas and thinking along the lines of terror but didn't want it to be hard-core .. twin towers, executions on the internet, things like that. Somehow I got onto Godzilla, then realised with that laser beam or fire breathing thing he does he would in fact have flaming lips! Actually one thing I definitely didn't want to do was go down the road of lips on fire, lips with fire texture etc etc. Godzilla seemed far enough away from that but with a nod to it, so i went ahead with it.

http://www.threadless.com/theflaminglips/the-terror-22/

Two other designs ...

*Need to read the fine print on this one.

And then the disqualified ones. These two Star Wars ones were panned because they thought they might run into copyright issues. Hmmr.

I've half a mind to make the Arrgh2d2 one up myself cos I'd like to wear it. 

This one was for an Iron Man competition. It got brushed because the rules said not to include characters from outside the Marvel universe. I figured Mike Tyson was a real person and not a character. Turns out I was wrong - and fair enough too. Tyson's both a real person and a character.

more SOPA

Good to see Adolfo's melon in the paper today. He's at the SOPA awards to represent the art department and I'm sure he did a fine job. He texted me saying "I'm looks Peter Sellers in 'The Party.'" Class.

Of course the article got it wrong saying Simon Scarr only won an Award of Excellence for his Wiring the City graphic. He also won Honorable Mention for his Arteries of the City.

Harry Harrison won Honorable Mention for Editorial Cartoon http://wp.sopawards.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/661-South-China-Morning-Post-The-Handover.pdf - (mind blowing!) and we didn't win anything for illustration because they don't have an illustration section!

If you're a journalist you have 11 opportunities to win a gong at SOPA, photography: 2, graphics: 1, multi-media: 1, design you also have one chance - but only if you work on a magazine - and illustration you don't get any opportunity at all because although it's quite definitely the most difficult of the disciplines, we're also quite definitely at the bottom of the food chain. Overlooked, forgotten, left in a dark corner, occasionally spat on until after design and photography have struggled with a page and unable to find a solution, it lands on our desk and, with minimum turnaround time, we crank out a page holding illustration. Don't tell anyone but some of us even get paid!

The article also says that the China desk was the big winner but if you look at it another way, and get the information right, the big winner was Simon since he won 100% of the graphic awards. Well done Simon ... I had no doubt!

SOPA Awards

Congratulations to Simon Scarr for cleaning up at this years SOPA Awards! 

First place for his Wiring the City graphic, a look at the amount of electricity used in Hong Kong, where it's used and who's using it.

Also see Simon's explainer on is blog:

http://graphics-info.blogspot.hk/2012/12/as-government-considers-revamp-of.html

Also second prize for Arteries of the City which shows the traffic usage of certain roads in HK plus the percentage change from the previous year

Again, Simon's blog: http://graphics-info.blogspot.hk/2013/01/arteries-of-city.html

Well done mate!

Dead Branches

'Dead branches' is a term for young single men with no prospects of marriage largely due to a disproportionate number of women to men in that society ... 'dead branches' because the family tree won't continue. 

The article bounced off the horrible rape and murder in India recently and the rising number of similar incidents that are occurring. It says an uneven ratio of men to women often leads to violent crime especially towards women and can also lead to violent uprisings against the system ie. revolution.

Bewilderingly it was suggested to take out the weapons. Wtf?

Adolfo's Kowloon Walled City

This is a graphic Adolfo did for last week Saturday's edition of the South China Morning Post.

I hadn't heard about the walled city till I came to Hong Kong but was immediately fascinated with it - like most people I think - so I was really pleased when we saw there was an opportunity to do a major graphic on it .. and Adolfo was the man for the job!

It's had a HUGE response in the office, around Hong Kong and online. Apparently the Editor of the Washington Post said something like it was the best info-graphic he'd seen in years.

The amount of detail is incredible, the sort of graphic you can get lost in for hours .. and I'm guessing people did. 

He started by drawing the entire city then did a pull out section of it which allowed him to detail all the intricacies and aspects of the city.

Daily life and extra information

Of course being about the walled City it had to include some of the sketchier sides of the place ...

As well as some of the positives

This part is also really great. It shows the density of the city over time (and yes he drew all the extra cities). A great easter egg as they say.

But the best easter egg of the graphic is this ..

The figure on the roof is one of the girls in our department, Kaliz. 

During winter she wore a beanie that looked like Where's Wally's (apart form not being red and white) and we started calling her Wally's sister for a while. So when this came up, it had to be done. Class!

Melofeij Awards

Just landed in Pamplona with Simon Scarr and Adolfo Arranz for the Melofeij conference and awards this week.

We're all pretty wrecked after more than 24 hours in transit but looking forward to an awesome week. Hoping to meet a lot of talented graphic designers - other than the two I'm traveling with.

We're also wondering if we'll be the group that's travelled the longest distance to be here. I guess we'll find out later in the week.

Brian Wang

Also last year Brian Wang won an SND award for the following illustration. I was going to include it in the last post then figured rather than tack it on the end I'd make a separate post for it. It certainly deserves it. Class job.

SND results

Here's how the South China Morning Post art department went this year in the SND awards. The biggest prize was for Adolfo's wine tasting graphic where he bagged a silver.

Then these three for page design (what?). The first two from Adolfo 

The this one from Simon again for page design. Not graphics. Right.

Here's how we did in 2011 ... Simon cleaning up with 5 awards, three for graphics ...

One for portfolio which included the ones above plus the following three ..

Plus the Iraq's Bloody Toll won for page design.

Simon Scarr

Of course Adolfo isn't the only one in our department to win a silver award. Simon won our first ever silver at Milofei last year with his 'Iraq's bloody toll' graphic. (amongst many other awards)

The graphic coincided with the US removing all troops from Iraq after almost 9 years. The dark red indicates coalition casualties while the lighter red indicates civilian deaths, it tells a story, yeh? 

In this copy from a pdf it looks streaky but in the real version the reds are huge, dominating blocks of colour. 

The red chart at the bottom of the page that looks like pools of blood indicates cause of deaths.

While the grey charts down the side show the number of US troops in Iraq, breakdown of coaltion deaths by country and comparison to Iraqi security forces and finally, a breakdown of coalition fatalities by areas in Iraq. 

The grey was a deliberate choice so as not to fight with the stark red statement.

This graphic appeared as a stand alone back page for the South China Morning Post. For more work by Simon, follow the link at the top right hand side of this page to his blog.

Surrogate Mothers

I'm pretty happy with the execution of this. It's clean, simple and has a few things going on. The idea is what I'm happiest about most tho.

A bit of runaround text wld have surely helped the design tho.

Illustration for the Focus page for the South China Morning Post

James Brown caricature

I'm pretty happy with the overall caricature here. I've put in a bit more detail than i often do. My thinking is that I'm going for the older James Brown and older people have earned more detail - can't explain it further than that. Also pleased with the choice of purple.

Of course my favourite part is the easy part and that's the vinyl record texture in his hair. That was going to be in it from the get go. I went for a cigarette and thought about it. His hair is such a feature, imagine the contribution he made to the hole in the ozone layer (which btw is now fixed) based on hairspray use alone? 

But the grooves of the LP record well replicate comb strokes, so that was the starting point. Actually his teeth are piano keys but probly not noticeable. Really it needs some black keys to sell that but when it was tried it just looked wrong. The keys were kept - but just for me, cos I can tell they're not really noticeable. 

His toothy smile is also a big feature. I like the idea of taking two of his big features and giving them a treatment, then working the rest of the caricature around it. 

James Brown caricature published in the Review section of the South China Morning Post.

Summer Reading

This was the cover for the Review for the South China Morning Post on the subject of summer reading.  

It actually started off a lot more complicated than this but the more i parred it back the more I liked it. In the end it's really very simple, but I like that it's bold and yet is still quite soft. The shapes are quite loose but I think it's the colours help with keep it soft .. and for mine they say 'summer'. The white for the hat lightens everything right up. 

An earlier version had more of her body and was symmetrical but i'm glad i went tighter and off centre. Tightening the crop gives more chance for the reflection in her sunnies to be noticed. I rarely like symmetry. Off centre always feels as if there's more going on since the 2nd half of the illo isn't essential a reflection of the first.

The one that got away

... and ironically it's a mousetrap. 

This was supposed to illustrate a story on a pyramid scheme in Hong Kong where they lure Mainland Chinese in and rip them off. The thing is they went to great lengths to dodge the term pyramid scheme so the feeling was we might get sued if we ran the illo. 

Shame, I was pretty pleased with it.

Bondage

This illustration was for the Review section of the South China Morning Post. The story was about bondage in literature.

Dr Robot

A Health Post cover from a few week's ago for the South China Morning Post. The obvious way to go with this wld be to have a robotic hand holding a scalpel, but I liked the idea of having the stitches as binary code instead .. bit more subtle. The argument against it was that some people might not get it. If I was to come across something that I didn't immediately get, I'd think, "but hang on, someone has published it so it must make sense," and look further. Classic case in point, Gary Larsson. Many times I didn't get Larson at first look but as we all know, with him, there was always a payoff if you put in the time to figure it out.

Health Post also went with my suggested heading, so i was pretty pleased with that too.

Internet hate

An illustration for the cover of last weekend's Review in the South China Morning Post. The story was about a film where a woman is persecuted on the internet.

Gangnam Style

PSY's in Hong Kong this week for the South Korean Music Awards. He also performed in Macau. This is an illustration for the Focus page in the South China Morning Post.