If you’ve been clicking on the artwork images on the homepage, you might have noticed that some of that stuff is from way back in 2003. You have been clicking on them, right?!
It’s fair to say that I don’t have a massive portfolio at the moment, so I have included the only two pieces of art I’ve ever had published. They are from when I studied graphic design at university a very long time ago and I’m using this post to explain myself.
First up we have Fantastic Ferret, which was published in the Design & Art Direction Student Awards Annual 2003. D&AD sent out a call for student submissions that had to be faxed back to them. I said it was a long time ago. The one asking if you can draw a ferret caught my eye. Amongst my friends at university we had an ongoing joke about long mustelids like weasels and pine martins so this was an obvious choice for me.
I grabbed a piece of A4, drew my ferret in about 5 minutes and faxed it off to them. And for my own amusement, I made a few photocopies, rolled them up and put them in some friend’s pigeonholes so they had a nice surprise waiting for them. I figured that would be the end of that. Then a few months later, one of my friends told me my ferret was in the annual! I would never have know if they hadn’t said anything and a copy of the annual sits proudly on my bookshelf to this day. The original drawing is lost to history itself.
Next up, prepare for a very similar story for Gimpson Forever. The once popular, then defunct but now maybe back online in online form or something The Face magazine used to hold an annual competition called Deface The Face where they asked artists to ‘remix’ their front covers. Accordingly, a bunch of us at uni sent in some entries through the post. Again, I told you this was all a long time ago. I submitted two.
The image on the left was really just a test of my burgeoning photoshop skills where I swapped the faces around. The Faces. Get it?! My second image once again took about 5 minutes using a pen and some masking tape on a photocopy of a front cover. On my art foundation course before university, some friends and I had a shared book full of nonsense drawings like this, so it was the natural thing to do.
I stuffed both pieces in an envelope and once again figured that would be the end of that. I wasn’t a regular reader of The Face, but luckily other people were keeping an eye on the competition and two students from my university were selected as winners, so I quickly found out that my 5 minute master piece was selected. Two copies of that magazine sit proudly in a draw to this day.
So there you have it, the only work I’ve ever had published and it took me around 10 minutes total with a pen to create them both over 20 years ago. It has been all downhill from there.
Matt Hart 