Back in 1977, I started art college on an Advertising Design course, as the only thing I seemed remotely good at (sic) was drawing. I had a great time finding all about Cow Gum, Letraset, Pantone and how surprisingly easy it was to cut yourself with a scalpel. Two blood spattered years later, I left college and after some time, found myself a job as an Illustrator doing health related cartoons for the local NHS.
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| Young, Gift-Wrapped and Black and White |
30 years later, redundancy looms shortly and a new career beckons, so at this pivotal point, I thought i'd look back at some of the work I churned out at college. Bear in mind, Star Wars had just come out and space toys were about to go nova...
The curriculum required us to prepare colour roughs and visuals for adverts for various items, such as fish & chips, milk, glue and a mock cover for the radio times. During the summer break of 1978, we were given a project to produce some work based on a chess piece or a door knocker. Unfortunately, my 19 year old head was not on the Earth at all but engrossed in a world of fantasy and science fiction!
I enjoyed painting with Gouache, a new type of flat colour paint that was a staple of designers at the time and as my experience grew, experimented with acrylic paint, for brighter colours. The influence of the Paper Tiger series of books showing the work of artists such as Chris Foss, Roger Dean and Rodney Matthews and the Terran Trade Authority series had a tremendous impact on me and I even went so far as to acquire and airbrush. This proved disastrous though as my impatience overtook my ability and I soon got fed up endlessly washing out the spray nozzle and masking off sections of the artwork with little bits of Frisk film. So I returned to my two staples, the brush and the wonderful Rotring Variant drafting pen, which could produce a marvellously 0.1 mm line in deepest black ink.
The tutors on the course were largely unimpressed by my sci-fi exploits though, as I had managed to sideline and marginalise most of each and every brief I was given!
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| DOOR KNOCKER |
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| ROUGH VISUAL FOR PRITT GLUE |
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| VISUAL FOR RADIO TIMES COVER |
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| ROUGH FOR SELLOTAPE PRESS AD |
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| MILK MARKETING IDEA |
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| CHESS PIECE OBJECTIVE STUDY |
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| CHESS PIECE OBJECTIVE 2 |
Ah, there's nothing like a trip down memory lane, Bill.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure your future will be so bright you'll have to wear shades!
Love your knocker by the way!
Brilliant stuff, love the sky in the second chess piece picture.
ReplyDeleteLovely stuff, Bill! That should've been worth a D&AD pencil or two?
ReplyDeleteAnd good to see an acetate overlay again (he said, fondly remembering his own, and mixing up a bit of fairy liquid to get the white masking paint to stick to it :)
Best -- Paul
Best of luck on your final day at the NHS Wote. 30 years! Its a lifetime and a milestone very few of us reach. I fear that today's generation will have to job around much more than we did. If only we could go back to the Seventies with what we know now though. What would you say to that young and talented 18 year old Bill in the photograph?
ReplyDeleteTakes me back to my similar exploits in 1980! Now I'm re-learning how to do it all in Autodesk and Photoshop. Although everyone keeps saying Blender and Gimp are better, so I'll be giving those a whirl!
ReplyDeleteI too thought gouache was the bees knees, but fount that if you tried to hard to get a flat finish, you ran the danger of getting dark streaks that looked damp but weren't!
And I still have all my Lettraset somewhere! When I was at A4U one of our photographers was an ex-East German girl, and she collected the soviet equivalent of Lettraset, they were all over eBay GE at the time, they were brilliant, all little military vehicles, toys, dolls stuff, obviously used as cheap playthings, like our Patterson Blick but without the date booklet!
I'll eMail you re. P'Sp again, good luck in the job market, but have a few weeks off!!
Hugh
PS...I learnt not to cut my fingers!
#hugh - the drying effect of gouache was used for a nice texture effect by Ludwug Hohlwein in the 30s-40s, see f ex the coat in
ReplyDeletehttp://thecricketchirps.tumblr.com/post/32139942046/ludwig-hohlwein-red-cross-collection-drive-914
(a google search on his last name will give a nice overview of his work)
I've had some real posters of his in my hands at the IWM archives, and it's lovely to see.
(a google search on his last name will give a nice overview of his work)
@bill - gouche was already around for donkey's years when we were in college. :)
Best -- Paul
Bill, I didn't know you were quite the artist! Really neat stuff there and lots of talent on this blog as a whole too.
ReplyDeleteYep Art came first, always has. Im hoping to put it to new use in the next few years
ReplyDeleteCool stuff Bill!
ReplyDeleteLove the RT cover and the Sellotape!