Greetings friends! Here is a straight-up documentation of my most recent commission. I was contacted by my agency with an offer to produce a series of illustrations for City Art, Sydney. “City Art is the City of Sydney’s program for public art, supporting local and international artists to contribute to the creative and cultural heartbeat of our city.”

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LE BRIEF

Based on the compilation below, my agent said that the client had selected my style of work for a concept phase with the following brief:

“The successful artist will be invited to produce ten illustrations to realistically portray a selection of public artworks in the City Art collection. The artist is to produce illustrations of works in their entirety, which can be easily recognised by the public.”

The client was looking to create ten illustrations, in postcard form, of artworks and sculptures located in the city of Sydney.

Before they were happy for me to proceed, I was required to complete a “concept phase”. This was a matter of emailing them a proposal of how I would visually represent each illustration (style, colour, composition etc.) along with a rough mock-up of one of the artworks as an example.

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HOW ABOUT THIS?

I sent the below image as a mock-up with the following proposal:

“THEME

Regarding a theme running through the postcards, I thought it would be great to depict each artwork with strong natural lighting. It’s an element I like to include in a lot of my illustrations, where strong shadows are cast (see the “Toycar” & “Bedroom” images in the examples of my work you were sent.)

I think this will create a more impactful and complimentary portrayal of the pieces, by having a feeling of a “real” moment in time being caught. Sort of in the style of Edward Hopper’s compositions. He is a big influence on my artwork.

Strong lighting/shadows also highlight the form and the little intricacies of the artwork pieces. The unique shadow of “Halo” I thought was really lovely, and is probably an under-appreciated element to this piece for passers-by, who can only really view it from ground level.

COLOUR

Colour wise, I was thinking of having the background and surrounding elements in low saturated colour, and the artworks in more bold, saturated colour. I think this will bring more focus to each piece, and give them more impact. (See image A and the “Toycar” image for example)”

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OH IT’S ON!

They were happy with my proposal, and decided it was necessary to carry out the illustrations in two sets of five. With the first 5 artworks confirmed, I went about creating two rough compositions for each of the first five to send them.

That was the initial plan anyway, but a few weeks into the project they decided they wanted to change it to just five images. It halved my fee for the job, but also halved my workload, so I was fine with it.

Below I run through the working process for the project. You’ll see for some of them I initially went a bit overboard with the colouring. I drifted away from the style proposal I first put to the client, of which they reminded me, and I later toned down the colours.

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ROUGHS

I was provided with a few source photos of each artwork and did my own research to find more.

It was important to get a good idea of the scale of each piece, and how it sits in it’s surrounding environment. As lighting and shadow were to be a key feature of each illustration, I wanted to find images that also showed how the light hits each piece.

ARCHIBALD FOUNTAIN

There were many options for depicting the large fountain, but I felt that simply cropping and directing focus to the top of the fountain worked best in my eyes.

For every piece of artwork you work on it’s crucial to get the original drawing (line work) right, as this is the foundation, and you can’t build anything on a weak foundation.

As mentioned before, I went in too bright and “psychedelic” with the colouring to begin with, and was asked to strip it back. The addition of the cockatoo(a bird!) was an idea I thought to incorporate in the rest of the illustrations as a little way of tying them all together.

IL PORCELLINO (STATUE)

Looking back on the set of illustrations as a whole, I think this one probably looks odd in comparison to the layout of the others. The client said they were happy with it though, and with the deadline looming, I thought it wouldn’t be wise to argue to do a redesign.

It was challenging to get a different angle other than straight on, as the main focus point of the statue is the golden snout. This gold stands out a lot more when you take the colour away from the background.

DOBELL MEMORIAL (SCULPTURE)

After some deliberation, the client asked me to redesign this one. They said the initial angle I went for, while interesting, made it difficult for viewers to recognise the artwork.

I sketched up the second version incorporating the surrounding environment to enable the viewer to recognise it a bit more (as if the design of the sculpture isn’t distinctive enough!)

WHAT BIRD IS THAT? (MURAL)

With this one I initiated the redesign myself. I thought the original upward angle was cool, but as with the Dobell sculpture above, I thought the artwork had to be shown more in context with it’s surroundings.

The more front -on angle allowed me to include a lot more shadow and lighting aspects to the illustration, which I feel is a specific characteristic of my style of work.

EARTH VS. SKY (INSTALLATION)

This one was a bit of a struggle. The artwork was a large fig tree which is under-lit with coloured light that aims to contrast whatever colour the sky is at any given time.

My proposal of having a colourless background and colourful artwork, was challenged by this installation, as both the background and the tree essentially are the artwork and need to be in colour. After discussing it, the client decided that it was too difficult to make this work, and that it would sit well alongside the other illustrations.

HALO (SCULPTURE)

This was the sculpture that I used in my proposal, but as the client specified that they wanted all the illustrations in a portrait format, my first design didn’t work as well and was rejected.

I was a bit disappointed, as I really love the idea of showing the sculpture from the top-down angle, showing that unique shadow on the ground below.

The client was quite particular about showing the old tobacco factory in the backdrop, so I had to include that. It was quite tricky trying to show a bit of detail in the building, but not take too much away from the sculpture itself.

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Well there you have it! Every job is a new learning experience both in the technical, creative process, and also in working with clients in a sympathetic way, in order to complete the project to mutual satisfaction.

YOU! Let me know below if you have any questions about absolutely anything, or if you liked a particular image.

Lots of love, Ainsbar.