Andrew Rae interview
HUCK: Your illustrations are on a new range of DC snowboards. How did this come about?
Andrew Rae: They just called up. They had found this old poster from a ski resort with a map with wacky characters in it like a moose with skis and things. It reminded me of when you go swimming and they have those warning posters. I had done a poster for MTV a while back that was a festival scene from above with loads of characters. They just asked me if I would do something like that. It kind of grew from there. It’s about their DC Mountain Lab so I just populated it with loads of weird and wonderful characters.
Where do all these characters come from?
I tend to have a backlog of sketch books of characters and things that draw in my free time. When it comes round to a job, I just start looking through my books and see if there are any characters that will work. If you just follow the brief then you will be thinking in a certain way. If I go through my books, I find much more bizarre things. DC sent me a whole bunch of videos, shots and stuff. They had certain people and things they wanted. I just kind of filled in the gaps.
There is something a bit Where’s Wally about your work?
Yeah. When I first did that MTV poster, I realised it looked like Where’s Wally so I put a little Where’s Wally character in the corner getting beat up just so people knew I was aware of the reference. It appeals to kids too so it's nice to think that kids may see it and warp their tiny little minds. (Laughs)
What influences your work?
I don’t know, everything really. Whatever happens to be going through my head at the time. Quite often I have a bank of images that I collect off the internet and use as a reference. I also have a back catalogue of weird characters that I sell through the shop of our Peepshow art collective in East London.
What is your background in illustration?
I started out doing an illustration course in Brighton a few years back. The core group from Peepshow met up there. Then we moved up to London about nine years ago. I started off doing a flyer for a nightclub called Perverted Science that ran for five or six years. I was doing a flyer every month for that. We invented a character to represent the night that was called Meever. He was half moose, half beaver. That was good because it gave me a brief to work with and I had to produce an image every month. We handed out about 10,000 flyers every month so a lot of people saw it and I ended up getting more work off the back of that. I ended up working on a TV show called Monkey Dust on BBC 3.
How does animating for TV show differ from your usual work?
It was quite a strange process because they had lots of different animation studios in London working on it to get it out on time. So there were various different styles coming back. I was designing characters and backgrounds. They would try to fit into that. Then we had to make sure that everything worked together. We would get all the animations together and make linking scenes. It’s kind of tough because you have to create a lot of artwork pretty quickly. Lots of backgrounds. Lots of characters. It’s not like The Simpsons where they use a lot of the same characters every week. It’s a sketch show so there were a lot of things that had to be created quite quickly.
How much of your work is freehand?
All the drawings are freehand on paper first. I have changed my way of working slightly recently because I have bought this screen where you can just draw straight onto it which speeds up the inking process slightly. I still tend to pencil it up first. The main problem I always have with the computer is the scaling. You are not sure how things look at real scale when it’s in a machine. On paper, you get a real feel for the size of things and how much detail to put in.
Do you think technology like Photoshop and Illustrator takes away from the skill of being able to create something?
I don’t think so, personally. A while ago there was a lot of work around where people were doing illustrator work by tracing photographs. It became really fashionable for a while and there were a lot of people doing it quite badly. You see waves of people using certain effects or filters, which is quite a lazy way to work. I just try and think of it as a tool. Everyone needs to work with a computer now anyway because you have to email your work to people. But don’t let the programs dictate how you work, let how you work dictate how you use the program.
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