London Transport Museum and The AOI often run a competition culminating in an exhibition at London Transport Museum. I went to the exhibition last year, and decided to keep an eye on when the next competition opened. I have enjoyed illustrating London in the past, because it's a topic that's so familiar to me, and it's easy to go and find inspiration. The brief for the competition was 'London Stories'. The story could be true or fictional, big or small. Whilst looking online for interesting facts and stories, I started looking at old newspaper articles. I found a story about a man who drove his double decker bus over the gap between Tower Bridge. This story stuck in my head and so I decided to illustrate it. Telling a whole story in one image can be a challenge, so I wanted a story that wasn't too complicated, and this seemed right.
I used my iPad to make some quick sketches to work out what kind of composition I wanted, and collected some images for reference. However, the composition I decided to use meant that I had to imagine and work out some of the angles for myself, which took a long time. I like drawing digitally for this kind of work because it doesn't have to look pretty, and can easily be adjusted to get the sketch right. I then took my usual approach, deciding what colours I needed and making some painted textures ready to cut up and collage. Because the image was so large, and the perspective was really difficult, I decided to sketch it out first on paper, and then roughly transfer the shapes into collage. I didn't stick too strictly to my sketch, deciding to use it as a rough guide rather than slaving over making sure every piece of paper I cut was exactly the right size and shape. Collage is a process that usually doesn't involve sketching, and freedom usually makes a better collage, and so I didn't want to lose that.
I decided to make my image on a large scale so that I didn't have to worry about having any resizing issues later on. I usually work on a smaller scale, so it was a challenge to get finished, but it felt good to move out of my comfort zone a bit. The final image is A2, which made it slightly easier to get more detail using collage, however it caused a problem when it came to scanning it in. My local print shop can scan large images, however they couldn't scan my collage because it has to be put through rollers, which would damage my work, therefore I had to take a photo of it instead.
I used my iPad to make some quick sketches to work out what kind of composition I wanted, and collected some images for reference. However, the composition I decided to use meant that I had to imagine and work out some of the angles for myself, which took a long time. I like drawing digitally for this kind of work because it doesn't have to look pretty, and can easily be adjusted to get the sketch right. I then took my usual approach, deciding what colours I needed and making some painted textures ready to cut up and collage. Because the image was so large, and the perspective was really difficult, I decided to sketch it out first on paper, and then roughly transfer the shapes into collage. I didn't stick too strictly to my sketch, deciding to use it as a rough guide rather than slaving over making sure every piece of paper I cut was exactly the right size and shape. Collage is a process that usually doesn't involve sketching, and freedom usually makes a better collage, and so I didn't want to lose that.
I decided to make my image on a large scale so that I didn't have to worry about having any resizing issues later on. I usually work on a smaller scale, so it was a challenge to get finished, but it felt good to move out of my comfort zone a bit. The final image is A2, which made it slightly easier to get more detail using collage, however it caused a problem when it came to scanning it in. My local print shop can scan large images, however they couldn't scan my collage because it has to be put through rollers, which would damage my work, therefore I had to take a photo of it instead.
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