I have worked on a number of major illustration projects with the Royal Ballet education department since 2016 including The Nutcracker (2016), The Nutcracker animation (2017) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 2018.
View the website here: https://www.roh.org.uk/learning/learning-platform/unit/the-story-of-the-nutcracker/
In line with my work for the Royal Opera House, I retain a fresh contemporary style, aiming to connect present day young people with the tradition and etiquette that the Royal Ballet hold so fundamentally at their core.
Observing and understanding the essence of both movement and storytelling, and condensing that into a working visual has been a delightful challenge.
Referencing directly from film, photograph and performance, my illustrations incorporate costume and character detail, blended with a playful reinterpretation, augmentation or twist.
Drawing for the Nutcracker Key stage 1 required a careful reworking of household names and concepts – Clara, the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Mouse King etc – in order to capture the ‘essence’ for each character.
The Nutcracker Key stage 2 publication allowed for more freedom in the reworking of my previous characters into contemporary and abstract environments. With the graphics already established, my illustrations developed into a sequence of inventive scenarios, uniquely created to meet the specific needs of each page set up.
Moving my work into The Nutcracker Animation in 2017 was a natural progression and a delight. Working closely with the Royal ballet team and experienced animator David Haughey, my brief was to create backdrops, scenery, scenes, interiors and atmospheres for my drawn characters to inhabit. A close working relationship with the animator was key, with many variations tried and tested along the way. Once created, my characters where deconstructed into component parts on order for the hand-rendered animation process to take place.
Creating illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a dream job. The challenge was reinterpreting, through my strong graphic style of drawing, a set of illustrations that reflected the huge grandeur of each well known character, alluding to the stereotypes whilst striking new and original ground.
The pathway to this was a very careful study of the Royal Ballet aesthetic, scene by scene and taking reference from the production over and above the historic preconceptions of how each character ‘should’ or ‘has looked’ in the past. These are ballet drawings, not just story illustrations. They are dancers, puppets and costumes. Taking this into account, within this set of Royal Ballet characters, including an inventive use of scale, a huge amount of movement and an exaggeration of pose, a significant degree of nuance and forth right attitude belies each creation.
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