Luerzers 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide OUT NOW!

Folks, I am delighted to be selected for this lovely, gorgeous publication! Here's the blurb from the Luerzers website:

"There were no fewer than 6,075 submissions received for the 4th edition of 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide. Yet – as the name itself suggests – only 200 actually made it into the selection. In a volume numbering 326 pages, we present you with exceptional illustrations produced during the past two years from around the world. Incidentally, the cover of this new edition comes from India or, to be more precise, from Taproot India, Mumbai. The name of the illustrator who produced it is Anant Nanvare. What particularly pleases us, as a publisher dedicated to showcasing the best advertising from around the world, is the fact that this illustration originally appeared as part of an advertising campaign (featured in issue 3/10). The motifs for Transasia Papers were also awarded a Golden Lion at Cannes in 2010"

Guess which illustration was selected...Garden Detectives, of course. That baby has done me proud :-)  Photo here shows my selected piece in situ on the wall at the Museum for Rural Life.

Working Drawings Conference // Sheffield, December 3rd 2010

I seem to be the last person to post about this...it must be the bad weather affecting me! Thank you to everyone else who has blogged about this in any way!
Anyway, I am heading down to Sheffield on Thursday to speak at this wonderful conference, called Working Drawings which has been organised by designer and lecturer Lee Ford at the Sheffield Institute of Art at Sheffield Hallam Uni. Try and go if you can, as there is an excellent exhibition to tie in with it with some wonderful work on show - including heroes of mine, Saul Steinberg and Alan Fletcher!

There was also an article by Laura Snoad about it in Design Week, (which I have not seen because I live in the sticks and can't get hold of a copy!) but which I found via mad.co.uk and have reproduced here - thankyou Mad! :

" Sheffield Hallam University will host a conference next month which aims to explore the different ways in which designers use drawing as part of their creative process.
The Working Drawings conference, which will be held at the university on 3 December, will see illustrators Jill Calder and Roderick Mills and designer Steve Smith, also known as Neasden Control Centre, share and discuss their working drawings and how they inform their finished designs.

Aware of a growing curiosity about designers' processes and cultural movement away from computer-based creating, organiser and Sheffield Hallam University visual communications senior lecturer Lee Ford sought designers who use drawing as an integral part of their working practice, from reportage and pictograms to topography and blueprints.

Ford says, 'Understanding how other designers think, look and, ultimately, communicate can offer rare insights into the design process. You gain an altered perspective, which may lead you to think differently about what motivates the designer.'

For illustrator and film-maker Mills, drawing is a process integral to his research 'journey', as well as to generating ideas. He sketches research material continuously and uses drawing as a way of fully understanding the connection between elements of a brief. He says, 'Drawing is an editing process. You "visually quote" parts of your research to create a final outcome.'

For Neasden Control Centre's Smith, drawing is 'a conscious sub-conscious process' and an essential instrument to understanding form. It is a method of looking and seeing, and is a key element of his finished work. At the conference Smith will be discussing more than 50 drawings created while working towards the exhibition More With Less at MU Eindhoven in The Netherlands. Smith says, 'My practice is driven by process. I was born in an analogue world and now live in a digital one and a lot of the exhibition in The Netherlands is about that.'

Calder, whose distinctive illustrations can often be seen in The Guardian and will feature in the Visa worldwide Christmas campaign, believes that as well as being vital to creating a strong end product, drawing is essential to communicating with clients, especially at speed.

She says, 'Drawing a picture cuts right through that and gets to the heart of what the job is and could become.'

Studio Myerscough director Morag Myerscough, who will be exhibiting her working drawings at the conference, agrees. 'People draw to explain something accurately, as everyone visualises words in different ways,' she says.
For most projects, Myerscough creates 'sketch walls', where research, drawings and ideas are spread out over a large space akin to a sketchbook.
Although Myerscough has always worked in this ways, she feels greater client demand for workshops makes a sketchbook style of working more useful. She says, 'When you're doing a big project with a school or something, it is important to involve the stakeholders and show the head teacher, for example, where your thoughts are coming from.'
Despite the different ways in which the speakers use drawing, all agree that the skill is essential for formulating ideas and should be a key part of design education.

Calder says, 'We live in the age of the artful mock-up. I sound harsh, but maybe it is a deeper-rooted thing, where the whole education of kids is geared towards using computers for everything now and so they forget how to pick up a pencil and draw. Surely this must have a knock-on effect on our business.' "

"Delete This at Your Peril : The Bob Servant Emails" by Neil Forsyth

Exciting times indeed! It's not often that I illustrate a pair of book covers where the main character is a 64 year old Dundonian cheeseburger van owner, who is then played by a top Hollywood actor (fae Dundee too, by the way) AND the book is featured on the evening news and then in The Guardian...and then becomes the top selling book! So, you say, stop yer giddy blithering and tell us aboot it!

The highly amusing, Dundee-centric "Delete This At Your Peril : the Bob Servant Emails" by Neil Forsyth is "a side-splitting romp through the wonderful world of Bob Servant where we see him engage with hapless spam-merchants as he tries to outwit them with some outlandish schemes of his own."  - "A very,very funny book" says Irvine Welsh...and you don't mess with him.

You can read an extract from the book featured in The Guardian here
You can even buy the book (and it's partner "Bob Servant: Hero of Dundee") here
If you then become obsessed with Bob and want to know more you can visit his website and also follow him on Twitter too

... And to top it all, You can listen the wonderful Brian Cox play the part of Bob Servant on BBC Radio Scotland in a serialization of the book every Friday from October 29th 2010 at 1.45pm and midnight. It’s also available on BBC I-Player.

My part? Well, the lovely Jim Hutchison at Birlinn Books thought I might be the lass to illustrate and hand-letter the two covers - especially as I hail frae Dundee too (well, Broughty Ferry to be precise - Bobland Central) The author also played an important part in the art direction too - Bob is his creation afterall!

I am, however, quite chuffed with my digitally doodled Dundee sunset skyline in "Bob Servant: Hero of Dundee"

Perfect stocking fillers, folks.....

Hi Ho, Silver - Images 34 Awards

Excitement in the Calder studio this week!

I won a Silver Award at Images 34 : Best of British Illustration Awards in London!
My work for Garden Detectives for National Museums of Scotland was selected by a panel of judges, including Angus Hyland from Pentagram.
Totally delighted. Quite speechless, in fact.

Go and see the excellent show in London at LCC (until 14th Sept) and then it is touring the UK.

HaarShop at the HaarFest in Anstruther!

Yippee - I have been invited by Lovely Pidgeon to take part in a brand new festival called Haarfest in Anstruther, which is organised by the lovely Kenny Anderson, aka King Creosote and the Fence Collective.

A big part of Haarfest will be a pop up Haarshop and creative extravaganza organised by Lovely Pidgeon in collaboration with King Creosote and the Fence Collective. OOOOooh yeh!

Haarshop is the creative hub of Fence's Haarfest festival which runs from the 14th-22nd August. Haarshop will be showcasing work by some of Scotland's best artists, designers and makers (and a few invited friends from South of the border). I will have some prints, pictures and cards for sale and will be helping out with the Haarshop too, so please come along and say hello!

You can also catch free acoustic sessions from the likes of King Creosote, The Pictish Trail, Adem and Meursault; electronic shenanigans from Found and Dr John Rogers and co; songwriting and patchwork workshops (not at the same time), photography and live art and theatre installations.

For Haarfest tickets check out the Fence website www.fencerecords.com
And for a bit of creative retail therapy come see us in the Haarshop at the Murray Library
between 10.30am - 6pm.

Tell your friends, family and loved ones, tweet, blog and facebook us, send smoke signals, tell the world!

... and remember HaarShop is here for 1 week and then we are gone!

Illustration Friday : Artificial

Artificial leg, arms...everything, these days. I heard on the radio the other day that scientists have successfully grown, from stem cells, new hip joints!
Anyway, this image was for a health column I illustrated every week for a newspaper in Glasgow. It's quite a strange one for me, don't you think? I do like its oddness though.

Tick Tock tick tock...with Draftfcb

This was a great job I worked on with art director Merry Natalia in the New York office of Draftfcb .
It's for a contraceptive brand called PlanB and had to be handled very carefully so that the artwork hit the right note - there were a few re-workings to achieve this!!
Working with combining illustration and lettering with a restricted, yet feminine colour palette, these illustration sets were for a story board for a potential animation. The work was also used in press ads.

It's a change to see me working with pastel colours, instead of full on brights - but I really enjoyed the challenge!

Marmalady made me a CAKE!

OOOH, I may live in a small village but I am surrounded by talented folk! One such person is the lovely Loren Brand - aka Marmalady - who not only has trained at Duncan of Jordanstone to be an illustrator but is busy trying to set up her business as a cake baker extraordinaire. She visited me during Open studios and when I heard she could bake a mean cake, I asked her to create a cup cake special for my "40 and a Bit" Birthday BBQ. Isn't it fab?
The flavours for the grown-ups were gin & tonic, margarita, strawberry daquiri and my favourite liquer, frangelico. The big ladybird on the top was a yummy vanilla sponge especially for the kiddies.
Want a cake ?- ask Marmalady!

"Breakfast" for Illustration Friday

Not done Illustration Friday for ages and ages! This week's theme reminded me of this breakfast table illustration I did : no Photoshop - all acrylic paint and ink!
Hello again IF-ers!

Breathe, breathe....Puuuuush!

I have been doing a spot of work for the lovely Jason Morris at Stella Magazine/Sunday Telegraph again!

I am a bit behind with blogging it as it was published last Sunday 27th June, but better late than never.

Zoe Williams' story about her experience of pregnancy and then labour (taken from her new book, Bring it on Baby) were funny and truthful and therefore good to illustrate - especially when the space allocated for them in the magazine is NOT standard size! Drawing likenesses of people is not my forte but Jason felt the illustrations needed to reflect the personal element of the story, so cue Google Images! Luckily, she has an interesting face to draw.
My colour scheme for this illo about Zoe's labour experience was blue and pink...so obvious a choice!

Golden Oldies # 2

Ah, just discovered this illo in an ancient Telegraph magazine (1999) -( yes I keep far too many magazines) so have dropped what I was doing to get it scanned in and blogged.
This was pre-Mac, so there is lots of Tippex all over the artwork to cover up blobby bits of ink, which you can't see in the printed version. I love what the designer has done with the type layout - it really adds to the illo and ties in well with the bit I was illustrating. Got to love a symbiotic illustrator/designer relationship :-)

Anyway - you should be able to read the article when you click on the image... enjoy the ostrich feathers!

Hibernacula Hit Wonder

Blimey, the first weekend of the East Neuk Open Studios went like a fair! I never even got a chance to sit down as there were so many people coming through the doors to speak to! Thank you to everyone - including some of the lovely followers of this blog - who came from near and far to visit my studio. It was great to meet you all!
Open Studios is not over though - it happens all over again next weekend (12th &13th June) so if you missed out please come on by.

One of my new ultra large prints  proved to be the hit wonder of the weekend, and I am ordering more of them today from Andrew, mentioned in the previous post. "Hibernacula Woods", despite the unseasonal wintery theme, is popular, it nearly made one woman cry she liked it so much (so she said in the visitors book). Here it is...

East Neuk Open Studios - it's that time of year again!

After a year out from ENOS due to house renovations, I have been very busy getting ready to open up my studio to the great British public again. The dates this year are June 5th and 6th, and again on June 12th and 13th, 10.30am - 6pm. If you fancy a daytrip to the beautiful East Neuk of Fife, come and visit me!

I am really looking forward to it and have created some brand new prints especially! I decided to get some of these new ones super-sized and found a great place in London called Digital Print Studio run by Andrew Turnball, who has produced some gorgeous big 50x70cm prints on Somerset Velvet Enhanced paper for me - recommend him totally!
Another new thing this year will be my work on ceramics...I hope. I need to chase up the company where I am getting the transfers done, as their website is a bit crap and they are even worse at communication! Luckily I have a good friend, Karen, at Funky Scottish who is going to help me out and will fire all the mugs for me in her kiln.

If you can make it over to Fife, then please do go and visit all the other artists, designers, jewellers and textile artists who make up our group- there really is a great variety of work to look at and buy. Then, if you are feeling peckish, you have a whole host of places to grab a bite to eat. If you are feeling flush go to The Seafood Restaurant in St Monans, just along the coast - tell Norah I sent you. If you fancy the best fish n' chips in Britain (seriously, they won an award) go to the Anstruther Fish Bar . If you want delicious pub grub and a mean bloody mary overlooking Cellardyke harbour, go to Trevor and Wendy's place, The Haven - I can thoroughly recommend that too! To work it all off again, you can wander along the Fife Coastal Path !

Anyway, for a wee taster, here is a sneak preview of one of my new prints, titled "Urban Fox"

New Turning Point Scotland illustrations

This is the third job I have worked on with designer Michael Dancer for Turning Point Scotland, a charity that provides residential rehabilitation services for people with alcohol and drug addictions and mental health and learning disabilities.
This particular job was for their Mile End service, which supports individuals with learning
and physical disabilities in their own homes providing varying levels of person centred support.

Michael just wanted me to do sheets of drawings that he could then use in the brochure and website - the budget was not big, as you can imagine, so I was happy to work like this.
Here are a couple of the sheets.

The Great Outdoors - Independent Magazine

I was asked by the lovely Stephen Petch at The Independent to illustrate a feature in their Outdoors Special edition, to be published 8th May in The Magazine. Sneak preview here!

The piece is written by four different writers (and all round well-kent faces):
Alex James,Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Joan Bakewell and John Walsh, whose story about his first time horse-riding I did this illustration for. I am a bit wary of drawing horses, but I hope I pass the test here!I like the rider's faces the best.
There were 4 illos in total, including a full page for Joan Bakewell's story about her first time youth hostelling in the 1940's.

It was an ace job to work on - but a bit of a nightmare logistically. I was away teaching, and so only had my 5 year old iBook (g4! shock horror!) to work on. Not ideal, so I then decided to work on the college computers in the evening - lots of different versions of the images were being bandied about on USB sticks etc , so it all got a bit confusing. I have promised to buy myself a new MacBook (pro?) with my fee for the job!

I have to say - it was great to work with another national newspaper. Sometimes I feel it is just The Guardian that commissions illustrators these days!

Golden Oldies from Jill Calder-No.1

As I mentioned on my facebook page, I have just found a glorious old green box, packed full with some of my old, original artwork (back in the day, before I used Photoshop)
My style is a bit all over the place - painterly one minute, scribbly the next but there are some interesting bits and bobs that I want to share with you.
I am going to scan them all in and put up a blog post every so often with some of these Golden Oldies!
All have been painted onto paper or card, using acrylic inks and paints and I promise I have not sneakily tweaked them - apart from the get the colour balance to match the original.
The first one is a piece I did in either 1999 or 2000 for The Sunday Herald (I think) - I cannot remember the article I was illustrating, but it I am blogging it to celebrate the 2010 Winter Olympics!
The second piece is a bit different in style and done for my old illustration agents, Eastwing, for a promo item (hence the shape - which is actually a cut out!)

I'll also try to find and post more of The Singleton cartoons that I did - I know I have a book full of them somewhere!

More Golden Oldies soon.

strange and stranger still

Thank you to the lovely Door Sixteen via her Twitter for this best blog link of the day.
Black and WTF
Sometimes odd is just the tonic you need. I love these photo - the dog's face! The butcher's face...weirdly absorbing

The Singleton Years

I am attempting to sort through all the STUFF that was moved out of my studio during the great Studio Ceiling Disaster, in an attempt to chuck or save it before I move everything back in to the now lovely, crisp white room.
Anyway - got distracted as I found some old, old artwork, so I thought I'd share it!

I used to draw a cartoon for The Scotsman magazine called The Singleton (yes, very Bridget Jones). I was given free rein by the art director, Sandra Colamartino, who trusted me for some reason (despite my NEVER having written and drawn a cartoon before). She also had a very awkward little space to fill on the horoscopes page!
There are millions of these little ink drawings, all of the characters are based on friends and real life happenings. The idea was that The Singleton was a girl about town, but not as sassy as the Sex and the City lot...more jacket potato and a pint of shandy kind of character.
Date on this one - 2001...and it is number 53!!

New work for Dickson Lewis

A nice wee job came my way a few weeks ago from David Reid at Because Brands Matter, based in Edinburgh.
New start-up accountancy recruitment company, Dickson Lewis, wanted a friendlier, more funky look for their website and chose an illustration route rather than the usual "business" themed stock photos that we see too much of.

My work had been recommended to David (word of mouth works!) and he managed to persuade his client that I could provide business themed illos, but with an added edgy dash of inky digital to provide interest! I kept the colour palette limited (dark gray, blues, purples)and tightened up my drawing style just a touch* to keep the whole thing looking sharp and clean. Blocks of colour are created using the polygon lasso tool and colouring in with my favourite Photoshop custom brushes!
I like this here accountant chappy - he's meant to be 35, so I hope he looks it!

*OK then, quite a bit...

Ay! Cuba Libre Señorita!

It's gettin' hot and sassy in Promo-land, I can tell you!
Friend and Johnson, my lovely reps, are pairing their illustrators and photographers together in order to create a punchy series of double page ads in Luerzer's Archive magazine. The ads will also have tags that you can scan with your iPhone to take you direct to the F+J website - nice touch.
The wonderful Coco Connolly, a creative director from Minnesota who is designing the spreads decided my work would pair well (contrast well!) with that of Canadian photographer, Jock McDonald
Jock's beautifully punctuated picture of young Cuban boys standing on the sea wall acts as a quiet, profound partner to my brash, bold Cuban girl drinking a...Cuba Libre (Rum'n'Coke, silly).
My idea here was that somewhere behind where the boys were standing would be a wall covered with huge, faded and peeling advertising posters,including this Cuba Libre one.
Coco has added in some final flourishes to the spread, using parts of the lettering I created for it.
It was great to create a brand new piece of work for this - so much fun thinking about Cuban heat and music, whilst the snow and hail fell in chilly Scotland!