Double Indy.. a Dindy?

Last week was a blur of busy-ness and most of it business, hence the lack of posts, it really is a manic time of year.

So (with a small build up) here is last week's Independent image; a vision of the realities of the Iraq war being erased as a response to my brief, which was 'The Chilcott inquiry - it shouldn't be a whitewash'. My interpretation was that the Inquiry owed it to the soldiers and families of soldiers who fought, suffered or died in Iraq to be thorough (and hence not a whitewash) so I wanted to show that they shouldn't be erased from history by a politically driven Inquiry. Simple idea and a simple execution. It's rather difficult to show an image being erased without actually doing so, hence I had to keep the actual image quite flat and shape-based to help create the 'erased' textures.


I was pleased with it, especially the colour combination, but it wasn't as nice in print, which is always a shame. The article is here

However, today's image I am much happier with. It looks really atmospheric in print and is one of my recent favourites. I can't say this is because it's highly conceptual or astonishingly intelligent, rather it's nicely composed with limited colours and containing several of my favoured elements (moody urban structures, figures and a sense of foreboding) when I'm illustrating.

The brief for today's illo focused on the Conservative party and the Centre for Social Justice Think Tank (run by Iain Duncan Smith). I was asked to visualise this as an attempt by the Tories to 'go red' to reach out to the poorest parts of society and was given quite strong direction that the red of the image should focus on the Tory figure and not the background. The image below was the result and both the art director and I decided the background should be quite foreboding to suggest the Tories reaching out into unchartered, potentially dangerous (given that they could alienate the base) territory.


The article to this is here and it's an interesting (if somewhat complicated) read.

Hopefully I'll have a few non-Indy related posts soon, but at the moment everything else I have to share is still unpublishable until it goes live or the pitch is over.

Have a great start to December!