Adolfo Arranz

Some great news yesterday. Adolfo found out he won a silver SND award for his wine tasting graphic. Great result and a very appropriate subject for him to claim a win with! 

For more of Adolfo's work visit his blog .. link is to the right of the page. (I'll be putting more of his work up later on too.)

Some photos of Adolfo celebrating with a fat cigar. Good onya Majo, well done!

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.