Jack Hudson

0:17Hi guys can everyone hear me yeah cool so this is my work it's basically lot has lots of different scenarios usually going on in one image basically I get a bit carried away and things just become a bit intense and I work in edit editorial mostly doing illustrations for magazines for newspapers advertising sometimes the occasional bit of art Direction. That's my dad over there with his hit single hardboiled what a legend some personal work here and there.

0:52And then the occasional bit of direction as well.

0:58This is most recent ad for round trees which I did which is actually running alongside of the books project as well which I'm here to talk about today around the time when Tashan got in touch with me about this book. I was doing lots of editorials for magazines this one was about uh space tourism or you know sometimes I like to do cross-sections into people's heads or into buildings or play with with like macro micro scales and this is actually something I did years ago for Eureka magazine which still now I'm quite proud of where if you look.

1:40So like as you P Turn the Page the kind of narrative changes and advances over time. So if you look at the caveman the Caveman with the two little unimpressed chimps he then becomes part of the band he's got some friends and they're cooking a little hog cheeky hug over there.

1:59And then he becomes a composer and gets a fullon Orchestra with lots of people watching them.

2:07So this is something that I wanted to kind of introduce and bring into this project that I'm here to talk about the Earth and ey this piece this illustration is actually quite significant today because I did this piece of work for a book called The where the why and the how and like to be honest like I don't love the piece of work but Tashan were kind of scoping out existing books that were around at the time combining science with illustration and they found my work from this. And it's actually a piece of work I did for free and then. I got this epic task through of the book.

2:44So the book at the time was called a book for All Seasons and as they said earlier it's conceived by James Lovelock who's like a 97y old guy an independent scientist so as you can imagine there was no no pressure there with finishing the book not at all.

3:02Anyway yeah.

3:05So it's a tall kit for the future and it was the ultimate Book of Knowledge and it contained 12 essays written by an All-Star lineup of scientists and Visionary thinkers so you know some areas I talk about I have to illustrate cosmology geology climate change all these different areas I'd have to kind of get my teeth stuck into and start producing some IM so we first had our meeting back in November 2013 so like three years ago we all sat around a table and this was kind of just to discuss and talk about the project and at the time they were actually thinking about going with 12 different illustrators so one per chapter but you know I managed to convince them to go for the cohesive approach with one illustrator little did I know the amount of work that I had to do so this is it 12 Illustrated chapters five to six illustrations per chapter all varying in size some D page spreads some spot illustrations one opening illustration for each chapter so that's 12 plus 12 chapter icons plus an overriding narrative for the books the concepts and illustrations so basically art direction for the entire thing.

4:25And then that number popped up. And I started to myself so this is kind of how my head looked at the time as you can see yeah looks a bit like a crazy man's notes yeah and I came up with this idea. Basically that the Earth was could work like the could be color coordinated to the Earth's layers but that so like the center of the book would be like the core of the Earth but that didn't quite work out.

4:54So we decided to color coordinate it relating to the chapter title instead in one of the initial meetings Tashan showed me this the power of 10 I don't know if anyone's seen it I'm sure you all have but basically this amazing video which I hadn't heard of or seen before at the time years ago.

5:14So we wanted to try and introduce this zoom in kind of narrative throughout the book. So at the start of the book they started off. So I introduced the icons as well into the book.

5:27So they started off almost like the idea was they're like en molecules floating around the page and this is just a quick sketch I did and then at the end of the book all of those icons are kind of interconnected as if you've got like a better understanding of every single chapter and here you can see some little sketches of how it kind of first started out.

5:47And then the final icons to the right. And this is kind of how the narrative played out so zooming in and then we see the icons on the earth and then zooming back out. And we see see that it's the human looking at the Earth as if leaving it to the reader to kind of do as they wish with the knowledge they've got from from the entire book.

6:07So then it began and we first we started doing proposals maybe like a couple of I don't even know now probably two years ago started doing this proposal for the first chapter we did it on Martin laws re chapter on cosmology so here's the first initial proposals and what was was amazing about working with Tashan is it was the whole entire process was so collaborative it was amazing so I had suggest maybe we could have this illustration flowing through the copy and so on and they were so up for trying out all these different ideas but I spent like probably a year or so and we were trying to I was basically trying to convince them that I could draw all of these things like supernovas nebulas water cycle carbon Cycles because my work used to well and still is I guess quite figurative so I was like I can do this I can definitely do this and cells as well which is something we kind of played around with and this is how the initial proposal turned out the first spread the opening spread which didn't actually make it to the book because basically I weren't too happy with it I think years ago at the time you know like probably about two and a half years ago I don't think I could have actually taken on the challenge of doing this entire book but over a year and a half whilst we're waiting for kind of to hear back from the scientists I managed to kind of advance and get a little bit better with my style but yeah Mr Tashan loved it the boss so we went ahead and this is kind of how my brain looked at the start of the project yeah scattered as you can see and it's actually surprisingly difficult to find inspiration on these science kind of subjects but two big Inspirations Charlie Harper for his Golden Book of biology and Fritz khah purely for like the way they played with they were just really playful with science and just intriguing and that's exactly the kind of characteristics we wanted to to bring to the book.

8:20So then January last year I went and met the Tashan team in Berlin again and we did put down 70 we like five of us around a table scbl in little ideas for all of the illustrations within the chapters onto poit notes and then. I had the realization that all of these things that I brought back home had to become fully fledged illustrations yeah. So quite a lot. And if you look at that image that little quick sketch we did in the meeting there for Bird's migration it. Actually turned out pretty similar in the end to how it turned out in the book.

9:01So I had to draw anything from animals through to quantum physics I think my naivity played quite a big part in this these subject areas representing the water cycle in snow globes as if it's like a little microclimate rather than the kind of stuff you'd see in a usual textbook or why not present the human cell as if it were a microscopic Factory with loads of little dudes running around and security guards protecting the precious nucleus this.

9:35So this here is so like sometimes the scientists would come out with really interesting metaphors and anal analogies for me to pick up on he talked about the universal trading bank here as being where every living thing is a shareholder so I got my inspiration from my local dlon post office as you can see the queue there of interesting characters and I just wanted to share with you this email which I got from one of the one of the scientists so I'd like have back and forth with those guys I'll just read it out to you jack we're a carbon based life form in a Stony silicon world all carbon based life depends on nitrogen phosphorus potassium and H2O all life traffics in carbon dioxide and oxygen on a sunpay in some withdrawal basis but even the Silicon will be behaves as if it is alive volcanoes recycle the water and the carbon dioxide from the Rocks back into the air continents slide around the planet like dodim cars at a Fairground crashing into each other piling up structures such as the Andes and the himalayans that water can then start to erode and turn into clay sand and Millstone and microbes and vegetation can weav into fertile soil without all this traffic life would blink out like a guttering candle and then it ends just a thought just just the thought just popped into his head in the shower so that's the kind of incredible stuff I get back.

11:09So I'd start my process with like a linear sketch somewhat like this.

11:15And then I'd build it up over time with texture and color in Photoshop and then it would kind of turn out something like this.

11:24And then sometimes I might start with a thumbnail sketch and then turn these into to rough tonal sketches and as the team at Tashan pointed out this. Actually looks a bit like a turd but it's meant to be a fossil so as you can tell I probably wasn't that advanced at the time when we did that.

11:42But it hopefully it didn't look like that when we actually finish the book.

11:46So these all all the different chapter openers together the opening illustrations here's a closer look yeah.

11:53So sometimes they'd have metaphors this one was about life's around so I'd have all the illustrations spinning around the sun which is powering it or the caveman here with their first tool of fire projecting up into the technological era we're in today or the Earth as a seed from which we can spread into the cosmos just beautiful analogies for me to illustrate so I ended up finishing the book after 3 years of working on it was completely exhausted and needed a break so I got married and you can see Han Hank Doom there from the spreads AKA dad that was there earlier went to Japan collapsed on a giant egg and then came back. And this idea was still in my head of this synchronization between Rivers and Roads and cells and cars and I really wanted to do something with it some moving image so me and my friend Joe bishard who's here tonight decided to do this as a story board decided to make a short promo and here it is for the book ♪

13:42and then three months later this turned up on my door and that's it