It has been quite a while since an update here... about 2 months, to be more precise. After the insanity of last summer and fall where I barely spent any hours not working, let alone any days, I was actually hoping for a much slower, quieter summer. Well, I got my wish with a summer filled with traveling, entertaining visitors, tons of sleeping, great food, a fair amount of wine drinking, book reading (it had been a while), gallery visits, sketchbook drawing.. as well as a little bit of commissioned work here and there.
Leisurely activities aside, I did spend a good portion of August redesigning my website. Originally I was going to hire someone to design and code it for me, but I decided to take advantage of my slower summer months and just do it myself. It was actually a large amount of work, and a lot of research for some of the coding, but I'm pretty happy with the results.. and I was able to set it up in a way that is much, much easier to update. I also simplified the general design and organized the content in a way that allows me to show a lot more work, including animation!
Just click on my new "Tim Tomkinson Illustration" logo, above, to get to the new main site. Or just click here. There are two smaller sections that are still under construction, but they may be finished by the time you read this.. whoever you are. Don't hesitate to contact me if you notice any bugs or generally dumb decisions on my part.
The image above doesn't really have anything to do with my new site, but a blog post with only type is sort of boring to me. I made that piece for a book pitch (can't discuss the details yet), and I later colorized it for a big party / art show that Friend & Johnson threw last May in San Francisco. All the artists submitted a piece that was printed as posters for sale. I have some extra posters of this for sale, as digital C-prints, so contact me if you're interested in purchasing one. Click here for a larger image.
I realize that's it's been quite a while since my last update. Thankfully, it's due to a huge amount of work in November and December, and not just complete laziness. In November, I worked on a project for Nike & Footlocker making artwork to be animated for 4 TV commercials. The work was added to live footage that had already been shot, with the animation going on in the background, but unfortunately the job was killed right before starting on the 4th spot. It's a long story which I will cover later when I post some of the work.. but it was still a great project to work on. For now, here's a teaser image: On top of this project, I've been creating much more work for Key Bank to go along with the current campaign I created over the summer. I've been doing collateral work for in-bank posters, brochures.. even for the backs of ATM displays, as well as getting tons of requests from individual banks for direct mail pieces. One of the coolest applications of this collateral work will be as large-format banners inside the Key Arena in Seattle. All of this Key stuff has worked out to be around 24 illustrations in 2 months, many of which I will post soon.. but here's a couple to start with: Also, in the past 2 months, I've created an ad campaign for IBM, made another 2 Men's Journal portraits, 2 more Spirit Magazine portraits, a piece for Dwell Magazine, a couple portraits for Walden University, and started work for some Patagonia t-shirts. More on all of these later...
Here's the 2nd TV spot for Key Bank, entitled "Medals". They interviewed Diana Munz, one of the US medalists in the Sydney Olympics, to talk about her medals and how she used Key Bank to help keep them secure. Overall I'm pretty happy with the animation on this one, considering they had to do a good amount of tweening to get the swimming and mermaid parts to work right.
I included a handful of stills from the final artwork I provided to Digital Kitchen. They mostly kept close to my original illustrations, but a couple of their translations didn't work quite as well (in my opinion). They turned the blowfish and the clam into 3D-rendered objects, that end up losing a lot of the charm and stylization of the more flat illustrative versions I provided. But this is an opinion that's admittedly non-objective. Aside from this, I think they did an amazing job!
This is the first of five TV spots for the Key Bank campaign I've been working on all summer (which I mentioned in the last couple of posts). Digital Kitchen is the amazing motion graphics team that animated all of the artwork, and actually came up with each visual storyline. And Cramer-Krasselt is the forward-thinking ad agency that hired us. My endless thanks go out to Noel Ritter and Lorraine Harkins (the art director and art buyer at CK, respectively) for hiring me to work on this great project. And another thank you to Anthony Vitagliano -- Digital Kitchen's creative director for the project -- and his team, for making my artwork come to life!
The first 3 spots just started airing in target markets this past Friday, so if you're in Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Boise, Seattle/Tacoma/Puget Sound, Portland (OR), or Hudson Valley (NY), you may just see one of them pop up in the middle of your favorite shows..
I'm still working on the last spot -- due next Tuesday -- so I don't really have time to post much info about these as of yet. But I will post more in-depth comments on each one later. You can go to the Digital Kitchen website for a full list of credits: http://www.d-kitchen.com/project.php?p=127
