Haven’t posted much on this page recently, have I been busy with many projects. Unfortunately many of them are not for sharing, either ever or just for now as we are awaiting publication. But this was my latest for Scientific American magazine looking at the migration of the monarch butterfly .
I have been working remotely with the EMCDDA designing graphics for their 25th anniversary. The latest graphic has just been launched looking at the monitoring capabilities and innovation employed to keep up with their remit. I thought I would be interesting to show some earlier sketches showing some steps in the design process and how the icons have been used in the table that follows on…thanks to all the staff.
the final graphic is below with the icons being reused to help the flow of the table.
link is here http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/news/2020/emcdda-preparedness-and-response-fast-moving-drugs-problem
Following on from some of my black and white gardening illustrations here I thought I would also show some of my colour illustrations first produced for New Scientist in 1990!.
The process was very different and everything was hand drawn, or in this case hand drawn and then painted using watercolours onto watercolour paper…registration marks were placed on the paper…
…we then used an acetate overlay to draw on arrows showing water flow – specified to be 60% Cyan for the printer – plus a front view drawn in ink – to be black. The text was typed and printed from a computer and stuck on this layer using Cow Gum. Registration marks to align with the layer below…
…another layer of acetate was used to show the water flow arrows (60% Cyan) over the top of the black lines black pointers for the text…
…any other particular instructions for the printer were then included on these layers. Only then was it sent off for proofing and printing, sometimes never to be seen until the magazine arrived in the office!
Here is a very bad image (only one I could find) of the printed version from February 1990 along with a hand drawn graphic showing transport costs.
Another example here, showing the same process just as a comparison…
Things seem much easier now…or do they?
Just an excuse to show some of my old work before the daily use of a Apple Mac was involved.
I was working as a freelancer when this was done and I was involved with the gardening section of the Sunday Times at the time. It was always good to see my illustrations on the back page of the garden section. My contact and gardening expert at the time was Graham Rose.
This was taken from sketches I made of actual gardens in-situ (mostly London based) and then drawn up to scale and design on CS10 paper and Rotring pens, with lots of scraping out of ink blots!. The numbers were glued on using the wonderful Cow Gum.
inset to show some of the detail…
One more…
and again, an inset to show the detail.
More to come in #2 with watercolours, Tomatoes, overlays, CMYK markups, and a Nautilus…