Daniel Frost

0:13Hello welcome thank you so much for join join us tonight my name is Daniel frost and I'm an illustrator I've been educated here in London at the RTA and I've been a professional illustrator for seven years. And I work for international clients before I go into the project maybe some of you are unfamiliar with my work.

0:36So I'd like to show you some example I'm also going to show you some examples from my previous trips my previous kind of research trips just to give you an example of where I kind of came from and where I've got to with the Green Line trip so oh well just in case you didn't know my name. There is a big so I do editorial illustrations for the New York Times and for dizzy and I quite like these kind of projects because they're quite quick turnaround zone and they're quite sort of fun and intuitive ways of earth looking at sort of current events alongside this kind of work I also do children's books and that's kind of a mixture of fiction and nonfiction. And I've been published by wide-eyed hogs the mini press and Hatter I love kind of working on books because you get this chance to sort of create a world of these kind of characters and different scenarios and you know I find I find that a really fun but actually they're quite a long process so it's nice hats or smaller projects to do in between in addition to that I also do advertising and I love doing this kind of work as well because it's you rarely ever get to your work at such large scale I'm going to last off the Transport for London as well as East Midlands Trains alongside this I also I like to do research trips just a kind of like sort of keep myself sort of connected with my own individual practice and you know to keep myself sort of developing and so I really pushed myself to try and do this kind of stuff at least so once a year the first trip that went on with Thailand and this was actually a residency that I was asked to do in Bangkok and this is kind of where our first flight sort of fall in love with sort of travel innings and sort of making work I was very inspired by the sort of you know by the environment by the nature and when I was there.

2:48And I was making a lot of sketches just having really a lot of fun with kind of making work while I was there. And I felt it was kind of like it was it was nice and kind of important to kind of do the sort of stuff this book has this. Actually ends up being a book which is published by hi which will actually wasn't my sort of intention I mean really I just wanted to sort of push it and try and have as much fun with it as possible but it's nice that it kind of ended up being a book published by someone the next trip I went on was a trip to Switzerland and it's again was the residences with a project called the jawn where they send you on a trip for a certain amount of time and you develop a print and this was kind of where I sought first sort of fell in love with quite sort of otherworldly places I don't know if if you've ever been to Switzerland but it's amazing it kind of has this sort of you know these great big sort of amazing mountain ranges and then kind of and and in one part kind of forest and then sort of icy sort of landscape so it's quite kind of otherworldly in beautiful and ♪

3:59also I there is quite a lot of similarity between this and the Greenland trip because most of the images were made on the train from Geneva December it's a lot of the images were actually quite cinematic because everything was kind of seen behind a frame. And that's kind of something which I kind of came back to you later on with in the Greenland the greenland pain so on to Greenland so this is the most recent record trip I took after Switzerland I was quite sort of fascinated with going to another place I had this kind of otherworldly quality but maybe a bit more extreme I'm quite fascinated with kind of the Arctic and the Antarctic and places that are quite kind of inhospitable and kind of and I find these entry giving quite a humbling in a way it's kind of like sort of being another planet so when I got asked to go to Greenland I jumped at the chance it was a friend who asked me to go and it was really acclaim I kind of didn't know really know what to expect so I so I don't think I fully prepared fully for the trip I remember we were flying from from Copenhagen to Greenland so I was checking the saw temperature between the two places they didn't look like there was that much difference between the two but when I got off the airplane Ganga /black Airport and it was minus 27 degrees realized though I was in for a bit of a shock so I had to sort of think about my sort of process a little bit normally the work I make when I'm on these trips is kind of I do a lot of work on-site because it's a nice kind of intuitive to attend this to the to the drawings but obviously you can't really do that when you're kind of outside in you know minus 15 and trying to draw with Arctic gloves is actually quite difficult as well so so well that kind of that kind of gave like a nice extra sort of a different kind of feelings the drawings the drawings were a little bit more hazy a bit more fuzzy and I kind of added to this to the other-worldly sort of feeling of the place there was kind of many many aspects that were quite inspiring about Greenland and one of the main things was color like color was kind of appeared everywhere with sort of in terms of the sort of sky in the landscape and also sort of the color that was so broad bye bye bye humans being there kind of you know the sort of brightly colored houses and the sort of she and we're all quite amazing against this sort of quite pale and you know tonal sort of landscape also time and date time and time had a had a sort of big factor in sort of how how the colors kind of changed because because when I was there it was November it was and it was only three hours of daylight of her every day and it kind of it kind of made this guy like actually quite a dominant so the dominant objects because like he felt like he kind of had the same amount of the same amount of light but it was just condensed into a into a short period of time. So it's kind of felt more intense we're also very lucky enough to see the aurora borealis every night which was absolutely incredible if you ever get a chance to go you should definitely go through and it's absolutely incredible there was also as I spoke about industrial color so there was the bright sort of red of like ships and and this also the sort of arresting colors from kind of you know outdoor clothes anything for that and that was something that really fascinated me want to wanted you to I want to I felt like I wanted to include that in in the paintings and I kind of fell over when I was there these little bright colors were kind of like sort of non trying to sort of make it claiming this sort of in hospital it when hit in hospital that kind of scary sort of environment as I mentioned so our drawing was quite difficult outside so I spent a lot of the time.

8:19Actually drawing from inside I mean I did take a few photos and so I've got them up here but another thing that I didn't realize is that extreme cold as he makes the batteries on mobile phones and and cameras actually wear down quite quite quickly so if you're out and taking photos for a couple of hours the ill actually just die so you kind of you couldn't really take that many photos but that was quite nice and something quite interesting as well because because I was doing so much inside you kind of got these sort of framework of the the the places where. I was going from like old churches and boats and and things are banned it kind of gave the images are sort of cinematic feel which was really fascinating and kind of you know made the images of a little bit more kind of mysterious in addition to this as well as the as well as the kind of the framing because you were kind of drawing people in air drawing inside and people were actually quite close so it kind of the people scale was that was bigger across the landscape so you could kind of create another frame. But also sort of because there was almost silhouetted and the landscape was stronger it kind of added to the sort of mysterious. And sort and quite strange feeling of the place as you can imagine the landscape was absolutely incredible it kind of I mean from there it looks like a sort of surface of the Moon and that was something which is really fascinating to me.

9:45But it also changed throughout the day with the Sun only kind of hurt just popping above the horizon for three hours it kind of made the shadows kind of quite longer and it kind of revealed certain objects and took certain objects away from from you so even if you were there for a couple of days you could eat the landscape kind of changed and sort of made it even seem even more and familiar than it that it. Actually was not only that was it was kind of also part of the landscape were sort of just otherworldly in general without sort of tricks of the light and you had kind of ice melt they look like kind of great big sort of mirrors and and karate that sort of curled into each other which all kind of added to this of really soft weird and sort of otherworldly feeling of the place so I kind of looked at that and with my approach but in the pains with them I I kind of wanted to sort of stay quite loose and intuitive with the drawings and but also try and rework.

10:46And sort of layer over areas so you kind of really got this feeling that we were kind of sort of just visitors in this kind of sort of quite strange place clothing also kind of had sort of quite bigger a big effect on the work that I made because it was very very cold people tended to wear lots of layers and he kind of it kind of took people's kind of sort of personality away from them and they kind of became more like shapes and and and that sort of made it quite soft feel quite alien and also people had like you know everyone was wearing sort of quite heavy snow shoes so that sort active sort of walking on the snow and also that they have this kind of layered and padded clothes and it made it look like people were sort of walking on a self on another planet or something like that. And I couldn't help thinking about a little you know kind of strange sort of figures on my return from Greenland I also continued to sort of make paintings and sort of the sort of memories of the trip and sort of stories that I was told when they were there.

11:59So I've made their way into the drawings that I made I didn't actually see this by the way it was sort of partly from a story which we heard but I kind of found it fascinated and one way to sort of capture it.

12:10But I think that's what's really interesting about kind of taking these kind of trips and experiencing something real and then that kind of influence in the drawings is that it kind of gives a nice sauce a mix of sort of believability and for also fantasy as well.

12:26So I think there's quite a nice kind of mix and it kind of enhances the images at the time being I don't really know how this project is going to turn out at the moment I'm just kind of like sort of playing around with ideas it might kind of mix with another project will become something you know and become completely different or in my dear source you might just you know stay the same but for the time being I'm just kind of having fun with it.

12:52So I find that the journey is more exciting sometimes than the destination thank you so much [Applause]