Christmas at the Wall Street Journal

I did some fancy multi-coloured illustrations for the Wall Street Journal's Christmas gift guide. Here are some of the illustrations, from the Books section, and the big bow from the cover, in its three colourways.

The type was very relaxed on these, energetic and organic with the merest trace of digital tidying which even the most skilled CSI would struggle to detect. Most refreshing.

Jingle bells!

CHRISTMAS FACES

This year's cards were a blatant representation of how excited I get about Christmas. I realise not everyone shares my wide-faced excitement, least of all the elves (Brook and Leigh, Anne and John) who played the part of 'tolerant exploited labour force' for two days without complaint or unionisation.

But the card design was drawn with ink, printed in full colour by our excellent local printsmith, the circles cut and drilled by our other excellent local printsmith, then the faces hand-drawn by me, followed by stamping, tying of neon ribbons, folding, sticking and posting. Lots.

More than that, however, the ink I used is special. Very special. You see, it's...oh, wait, home time already? Coming!

Happy Christmas all!

Christmas again - in April.

If Christmas in August was weird, Christmas in April was even odder. This was done for Pitcher & Piano, independent bar and restaurant chain. I quite like the energy of this one...though you always spot at least three things you'd change once it's published!

http://www.pitcherandpiano.com/christmas

Frohe Weihnachten!

I was drawing reindeer back in August, which is quite normal for an illustrator. In fact it's quite late to be doing Christmas stuff. Getting in the mood when it's sunny outside isn't that difficult - by this time of the year, the Christmas 24 Channel is on telly a couple of hours a day, so you can binge on terrible made-for-TV Christmas movies till the nausea kicks in..but by that time, you've drawn your picture anyway.

This one I loved doing. It was for Monika Winckler, at Ernst & Young in Germany. I like the German language a lot - it's deliciously multi-syllabic, crisp and muscular - and this was a delight to produce. They also turned the illustration into an animation for the company's annual Christmas identity. (My favourite bit on this is the gingerbread twins of robustly ethnic origin!) I like to see my work animated and I'd love to do more of it myself...when time and brainpower allow. For this one though, I was happy to let the clever German pixel engineers do it.