The Christmas Radio Times Cover

Every illustrator of a certain age knows that a Radio Times cover is up there among the traditional bucket-list jobs - along with an album cover, a Royal Mail stamp or maybe a cover for a book by your favourite author. 

I've done the stamp and the album cover and the novels, but I'd never done an RT Christmas. I've got colleagues who've done them - Mick Brownfield being the most marvellous and prolific! - and once upon a 2015, I almost did too.

In 2016 I created the festive page headers for the Christmas RT, and a nice big bit of cover type and a hand-lettered DPS for the July edition too. 

But, before both of those, the 2015 Christmas RT almost had a dramatic, type-led cover bursting with stars (astronomically and celebrity-wise), over a night-time snowy horizon. It was different, for sure - but just a little too different for the audience. The art director and I were mega-keen, but sadly, in the end, the senior decision makers went with tradition and a beautiful image of a Briggsian snowman. And who can argue with that, albeit reluctantly?

These sketches are as far as it went and have lain hidden in my archive ever since, but I thought it was time they saw daylight - I like this idea that, maybe, this job will one day head back over Mole's way.

Who knows! After all...more unlikely things have happened after throwing a little cosmic ordering into the air...

Merry Christmas Telly to all!

  

Routes

Recognise anything here?

(Click the image to play)

My 'Flamenco' illustration has been used as a poster in the set for Rachel's Bedroom, in Channel 4's online 'alternate reality game' called Routes. The poster was hurriedly emailed off to my friend Kim at Oil Productions, who designed and built the game, to be printed in a matter of minutes before filming began.

Routes is played online via spaces like YouTube and the Routes website, and is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, involving multiple media and game elements to tell a story that's affected by participants' ideas or actions.

It's all very clever, and if you want to read more, here's more on Alternate Reality. Something tells me this is the future of gaming...or should that be storytelling?