Garden Detectives exhibition - grand opening!

After all my hard work creating the illustrative element and all the National Museum of Scotland's design team's hard work bringing the show into 3D, interactive life, Garden Detectives finally opened at a private view on Thursday 25th June!

Go here to see loads more images of the opening night, the exhibition and my illustrations, of course!

It was a great evening - starting with speeches by the museum's director, Gordon Rintoul and by Roseanna Cunningham, who is the Scottish Minister for the Environment. Of course a tasty canapé or two with a glass of bubbly was in order.
The whole design team were there: Maureen Barrie (project manager), Stuart Kerr (3D), Lisa Carrington (graphics) and Cathy Sexton (she who ensured I was paid!).I was also delighted to meet Matt Black who had built a lot of the exhibits and interactive elements.

Also present were lots of children and they simply proved that the show will be a big hit, as they poured into the exhibition space and leapt upon the exhibits with enthusiastic glee! I think the most popular section was the fishing pond, "Pond Dipping" where you got a magnetic fishing rod and tried to catch all the beasties, such as minnows, waterspiders and waterboatmen beetles and then post them back through appropriate slots at the side of the pond according to where they live : in the mud at the bottom, in the pondweed or poddling about near the top.

For me, it was wonderful to see the big illustration of the dreamy garden scenes in all their 8 metre long glory - very nice indeed!

Overall, I really enjoyed the challenge of this project. I love drawing but here I had to be accurate for education purposes but still retain my inky, fairly loose style. Also, working with such detailed technical drawings was at times daunting but the designers needed me to be spot on with where each flowerhead or bit of mint was placed so they could then tell the joiners and set builders what to do with out any mistakes occurring. Also, it was fairly large amount of illustration to do in quite a short amount of time but I do like a bit of deadline pressure to make life interesting!

I'll be honest though, if I never have to draw another adder in my life, I'll be very happy indeed. Snakes are hard to draw!

If you can, please go and support the National Museum of Scotland and enjoy the show.

The Flowerbed

This is a rough of another pretty big wall illo for Garden Detectives - 4.4m long
There will be interactive, scented elements here for the lavender and mint etc. and all sorts of other fun things for children to play with and try out. I have been having a job getting my head round the technical drawings that the 3D designer supplied - hence my scribbles on the rough.
Another wall section in this part of the exhibit will have a honey Bee Journey on it too!
The end is on sight now (it's been a week of working 'til midnight - most unlike me!)
and I just have a few more beasties to colour up and send off.
A few posts back I mentioned that a badger I did had been rejected for looking too "weird" - well, here is the new one. It got an "Aw!" from the designer!

Massive garden illustration for NMS

Now, this is a work in progress and is still being added to, tweaked and bits deleted, so if you come along to the museum for the Garden Detectives opening in June, you probably won't see this version.
This is the big 'ol illustration that will cover up to 8 metres by 2.6 metres (yes, 8 metres) of wall as you enter the Garden Detectives exhibition. I admit it has caused me problems in the making, as I am putting it together on Photoshop CS4 at a smaller scale, but superhigh resoltion (1200dpi). I was saving a version the other day and didn't Photoshop go and tell me that it didn't save files higher than 2GB? I'll not repeat what I said to Photoshop...
I can't wait to see this super-sized, as it is so inky and colourful. The designers at NMS did a test print of another big image and it looks amazing at room height, I have to say.
There are going to be a few other massive illustrations for other zones in the show, aswell as smaller images such as my toad (see previous post)
Deadline-wise I have just over a week to get it all done, so it's time for a mug of tea, a biscuit and on with iTunes (Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto, "the Emperor" to kick me off today then perhaps a bit of Leftfield)

National Museum of Scotland

Finally! I am able to write a bit about this absolute PEACH of a job!
The last couple of months have seen me to-ing and fro-ing to the wonderful, award winning National Museum of Scotland to meet with their very cheerful design team to discuss doing some work for their big summer exhibition, entitled Garden Detectives, which is part of the Darwin200 series of events celebrating all things Charles Darwin.

It was Stuart Kerr who contacted me - he is a D&AD award winning 3D designer and mad keen cyclist by the way - and asked if I had ever done work for interactive, large scale exhibits. Nope...but I'd like to.

Basically the exhibition is aimed at children and will encourage them to discover what lurks, lives and burrows in their own backyard, through the medium of large, custom built interactive garden sheds, flowerbeds and hedgerows...oh and a garden pond too.
There will be plenty of specimens and things to poke at too.

Where does my work fit in? Well,I get to draw and paint lovely, loose garden scenes and hedge rows with bird's nests,curled up cats and pond-dwellers, which will be supersized and applied to walls and to the interactive exhibits aswell. I am also doing a hefty amount of quite technical illustration of the creatures who inhabit our gardens too too. Now, for those of you who know my work, you would be forgiven for thinking "Jill? technical? Neat and tidy?" I did think the same thing myself. However, after doing some drawings of Dragonfly larvae and ladybirds for the Museum's resident entymologist, my style got the stamp of approval!
The brief was to draw accurately, but still be inky - these illustrations are to be educational afterall.

Needless to say, I am very excited about this job - which does mean scanning everything at 1200dpi, as it is going to be BIG!
There will be plenty more updates about this, so watch this space for any more snippets.

Above illustration is a garden cat and also another of part of a dragonfly life cycle. You knew that though, didn't you?