Heather & Jesse work

This was the scamp for the cover of a book called Here Be Lions, published by Oshun Books


and this was the final cover.

Heather has posted these on her blog as well, with a bit of a description of the process we went through to arrive at the final cover. This job was a Heather & Jesse job; H&J is a collaboration we started last year, marketing ourselves as 'contemporary crafters'. Our aim is to produce illustrations that go beyond the traditional drawing and painting media.

This was in interesting job because we were involved in it from the beginning, conceptualising as well as executing the final illustration. Things changed from the initial scamp - embroidery on knitting can be unforgiving! Initially we intended to embroider all the text, but once we were working full-size we saw the level of detail we'd be able to produce, and that the text would be unreadable. We had to make a few compromises that were dictated by the medium. It ended up a better illustration as a result.

Heather also posted a job we did for The Jupiter Drawing Room for a Musica campaign. We were called in to execute something a designer had come up with, and given references. She mentions that we were both a bit uncomfortable with this one - it was a straight copy of Jenny Hart's work at Sublime Stitching.

In my limited advertising experience, this is the usual way of doing things. Illustrators aren't part of the process until the very end. I think this is why a lot of advertising work is derivative - illustrators aren't expected to have a personal style, but to copy something a designer has found. Deadlines are very short, so there's no time to fool around conceptualising, and designers have to have something concrete to show before the job goes ahead.