•PREDATOR SAW






















•PREDATOR SAW
Der de!
Der de!
de de de de de de de

hope I've summoned up the jaws music as this is what the image is supposed to convey.
Commissioned by Dig for Fire in sheffield - (they do seem to get some very interesting accounts and always conceive some arresting images).

The saw was photographed and Photoshopped to enhance the look and then 'all' I needed was some convincing woodgrain, in the correct pattern of course!
I must have looked around half a dozen likely places - diy superstores, timber yards, furniture shops etc but in the end I created the texture from scratch in Photoshop and then judiciously blended one or two reference shots over the background.
Typically about a week later I found the perfect woodgrain on a cafe table at Chatsworth but the job was already done.
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• MAKING A SPLASH






















• MAKING A SPLASH
This was another drinks label for an empire expanding supermarket.
It required the fizz, splash and tinkle of ice cubes dropping into fizzy pop, not Roller Cola, mind you!
As ever it took Photoshop and Form Z to help out with the artwork.
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>>FRUIT SQUASH







>>FRUIT SQUASH
If you see the two earlier posts you'll read about the cornucopia of fruit jobs that arrived throughout Autumn.
This set is probably my favourite. Here are five of eight fruit squash illustrations for Somerfield.
Created by peeling, pipping, photography, pixel pushing and Photoshop.

•MORE FRUIT



•MORE FRUIT
The pumpkin job was a nice one to illustrate. I didn't have reference of pumpkins in stock so had to make do with the very small ones that were only just appearing in the supermarkets (this was early September) but with a bit of jiggery pokery in Photoshop it was soon 'blended' with a full size one from Flickr. Form z provided the yoghurt coating around the seeds!
Incidentally just after I completed this my Mac decided that it would show me just how infallible OS X really was and the finder freaked out on me. Having tried a repair using TechTools I ended up with a totally dead Mac that had to be rushed to the genius's or is it genii, at the Apple store in Meadowhall.
I hadn't backed up for a week!!!! but the good news was that I didn't lose any files, the bad news (other than lugging the G5 around Meadowhell, sic) was that I was left with over 35,000 files listed by number and file type only. It has taken me three weeks to sort through them.
I have now returned to a very stringent backup regime!
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• FRUIT FRUIT FRUIT
















•Autumn certainly brought fruitfullness to Hot Frog Graphics! I couldn't posssibly eat my way out of all the piles of reference as there was so much. I've often thought that I could probably make a living out of just illustrating fruit alone, and when you think about it fruit does play a significant role in our daily lives.
It started with these flavoured waters for Somerfield, commssioned by Watt Gilchrist. Then there followed yoghurt coated seeds for Stream foods - a strange combination of sunflower and pumpkin seeds.
Then I was so busy throughout September and October on fruit crush drinks and then fruit squash drinks that I didn't even get time to post the work on this blog.
So there follows about five weeks of work in the next few images.
One day I'll have to list all the jobs 'that got away' too.
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