Here’s a commission that was a little different than normal for us. We were asked to create three images of famous landmarks in a monolithic, dynamic pseudo-1930′s style. A nice change!

Here’s a recent commission for the lovely folk at Taxi Studios. The brief was to create a multiple layered Photoshop ‘kit’ for Nestea, so that other agencies and Design Groups throughout Europe can utilise the elements create various posters, POS, adverts etc. The leaf shaped water splash was to be used as a backdrop for photographed images of bottled drink products. One important criteria was that the illustration had to be created with transparencies so that it could be dropped onto any coloured background – which made it an interesting challenge!

All the illustrations were created and crafted totally within Ps. Just for a point of interest I’ve also added a couple of early 3D renders, where I’ve been playing around with water effects. Although my 3D knowledge is still in it’s infancy at the moment, expect to see this develop over the coming months… where Im planning to create milk, water, juice, and ice elements within 3D and then combine this with a little of my own magic !

Leaf Shaped Splash…

Detail…..

Detail…

Detail showing how it works on different coloured backgrounds

Additional Leaf elements for kit

My Early 3D renders….

Glass 3D logo with transparencies/experiment

Logo dropped into water/early 3D water/experiment

To see this months in the studio…..january just click on our website !

Lucozade have this month launched the new Energy Cola Drink in a limited edition black bottle, aimed at the energy drinks market of which Lucozade is one of the leading brands. Cola is the nations soft drink flavour, with consumers drinking 1.7 billion litres alone last year. Initially intended to be on shelf for a year, if successful it may become a permanent product.

We were delighted to be commissioned by the lovely folk at Bloom to create the new Lucozade bubbles to accompany the new brand identity. As the bubbles are so iconic across the whole brand, it was certainly a challenge to update the existing bubbles and create a new look that worked well. The key request for the brief was to retain the clarity and energy and help move the illustration elements for the brand to the next level. Using 2 special colours, the artwork also needed to be created in a way that would make it easier to be edited and recoloured for further use across the range.

The Lucozade Black Edition Cola Product

Product Label

Bubble Detail

Our new in the studio cartoon strip for October is now live at http://www.mylestalbot.com/20415/hello , so we have decided to show last months incase you missed it !

While having a tidy up in the studio recently I stumbled across an old airbrush illustration. It’s black paper cover was tatty and coated in a thin layer of dust, indicating years of neglect and abandonment. I then pulled back the cover and the memories came flooding back!

Once upon a time, in a pre-computer world illustrators like me actually illustrated things by hand. Yes that’s right… no ‘Apple-Z’ in those days. We used prehistoric tools called pencils, pens and brushes. In the profession of a technical illustrator, we also used  things called rulers, ellipse guides, scalpel blades and a sticky sided film called frisk – used for masking purposes.

So here’s a blog about my old TVR illustration,  the 4.3 litre Griffith. Created by hand some 20 years ago using skills not actually forgotten, just no longer needed in the modern digital age. So here’s how I used to work, back in the day…

This is a scan of the finished airbrush illustration, created by hand with acrylics and gouache paint.

The first process was to work out how everything fitted together. I taped a sheet of tracing paper over the photograph, and created a perspective grid, for use as a guide. Then, using a technical pencil, a ruler and ellipse guides I started the slow process of looking through the reference pics, figuring out what was what, and where and how it all fitted together.

This is the photograph the illustration was actually based on (note the Tasmin ‘Wedge’ shells in the background).

Here I have overlaid the pencil drawing on top of the photograph to show how it registers.

The finished pencil drawing, on tracing paper.

Pencil Detail

The next stage in the process was to ‘push through’ the drawing onto CS10 illustration board. That meant coating the back of the tracing paper with powdered pencil lead, and tracing over the drawing with a metal pointed pen, thus making an impression of the line drawing on the board. Then began the next stage of masking off different areas with frisk, spraying appropriate acrylic colours on the exposed area with an airbrush – again and again… and again until completion. All the details, lo-light, hi-lights and colored line work were then applied with an extremely fine pointed brush using acrylic paint and gouache. Phew!

Detail of the finished illustration.

Detail.

My beloved ellipse guides and ships curves… still with evidence of airbrush spray on them.

Kit – Sedco air compressor and my two all-time favorite airbrushes.

My ‘workhorse’ airbrush, the Japanese Iwata CM-B.

My very cherished American Paasche Turbo. The finest airbrush in the world – you could spray details as fine as a pencil point with this.  It looks more like a museum piece now!

The final and actual airbrush illustration.

I was delighted to be given this recent commission by the nice chaps at Vivid Creative. The four ethereal figures, were created as part of the new branding imagery for Ellis Patents, the words leading supplier of cable cleats. The purpose of each figure was to help define and support individual electrical product ranges, and to compliment the product naming strategy. Each character… Phoenix, Centaur, Emperor and Vulcan has a strong colour identity.

To see more on this project, and lots of other new projects,  please visit our brand new site which launched today!

To start the new blog off, I thought I’d show you a few stages of how the Raven Ale illustration was created below.

The first sketch didn’t initially make full use of the area, and it was decided that the Raven would be better looking back at the viewer, over it’s shoulder. Working in Photoshop a new line drawing was provided, and this was also rendered in B/W tone to indicate the mood for the final piece.

The first step was to set up the initial base tones for the scene.

Then on a new layer in Ps, I began to define the shape of the bird, starting with the dark tones to create depth and shape.

On a new layer I added some lighter feather details to create interest and also defined the beak.

Subtle brighter tones were then added to the feather edges, and the all important eye!

We now needed to look at the balance of the illustration as a whole, so I created the background clouds and rock elements we were using so that we could assess this.

Once the bird layer was turned back on, the larger soft hi-lights were added to the central areas to give a rounded body shape. Darker detail tones were then added to help the feathers stand out. Also the feet were rendered… and the illustration was complete!

Final Label.

The full Orkney Beer range.