Extended Practice - 'Selling Sustainability' Live drawing in London

The Brief:

• 'Creative Concern' asked me if I was up for doing some live illustrations as part of project communicating sustainability.
• They where doing a presentation and a workshop at a conference in London and they wanted some live illustrations to be produce alongside it.
• The illustrations had to talk about a number of different ideas about sustainability that are spoken about in the presentation.
• There where 8 different points that needed illustrating and the idea was to have four plain A0 boards that would each get covered with 2 of the points.
• The brief gave me a number of different examples/images that could help me explain each of the ideas.

• They wanted the drawings to match the brand identity colours so I matched the colours as best I could with the specific inks that I used and order a fresh set of pens ready for the day. I also took a range of my own colours 

References:

• They also gave me some visual references to work from, It got me thinking about how I could apply my own illustration techniques to simple and linear, diagram style illustrations.

Sketches:

• I made some initial sketches to take with me on the day so I had a good idea of the layout.
• I took some good pointers from the brief as a starting point for the drawings.  

Illustrating the points:

- Make the global local - A community of people stood on a globe, sun shining

- Reward and celebrate - A trophy, champagne popping, firworks

- Build your tribe - A group of connected characters with matching features and patterns

- Progress matters - An acorn growing into a tree, a graph suggesting progress, I needed some visual reference for this because was unsure...

- Its okay to smile - A character with a big smiley face

- Technology is your friend - A little rocket character, half robot half human face

- Embrace the ugly - A big ugly fish/slug character

- Left brain and right brain - Creative and mathematical sides of the brain, i used this picture to help influence my design... 

• On the day the arrangement of the boards changed from portrait to landscape, and also 3 boards instead of 4. This meant I had to quickly figure out a slightly new composition - also didn't want to squeeze 4 different board design onto 3 so decided to get rid of the first initial design and just work with others.

Live Drawing:

Board 1:

Board 2:

Board 3:

Full Finished Illustration...

• Working with more specific and explanatory illustrations in an almost diagram like composition is a totally different approach to what I have been doing with other commissions. 
• Working in this way has opened up some other possible directions I could take my illustration skills.
• I liked seeing how my work looked in a more professional environment with such specific content - a lot of my recent work has been driven by own interests in design - so this felt like a more commercial and formal project. 
• Aesthetically i'm really pleased with the work - I like how the drippy graffiti markers look when applied to this kind of design - its a very different approach to what I would usually take with this media.