Earlier this year our university was visited during an editorial project we were in the middle of by a former UCLAN student and illustration practitioner Ben Tallon. The lecture couldn’t have been at a better time as Ben has had much success in the editorial area. I found the talk very helpful and inspiring as he talked about his university experience and how he got where he is today.
Ben Tallon has worked for many different clients to date, but he has worked very hard to work for the people/companies he has. He explained that he actually invited himself to an art director’s home for dinner once after an exhibition, who he then went on to do illustrations for on an advert for E4.
He has helped me gain confidence in that I can’t look for a style and that a style will find me. Ben explained how he tried to be like an inspired illustrator and his work then lost its sense of quality. It’s pointless trying to be like someone who has mastered the style. He went on to show us a piece of his third year uni work in comparison to the work he does now and what helped him to produce his work. Having studio space and people to talk to about his work helped him work.
Going back to the editorial project we were doing at this time, Ben gave us an editorial piece to do a draft for by the end of that day. He came around the class and helped many of us improve our current ideas. A day to me seemed like a very short time to have a complete idea, but this was quite a long period of time compared to how long Ben mentioned he had had for previous works. He told us about how he was given an outline idea for a brief to do and agreed to do it, only then to find out he had around 48 hours or so to illustrate many pages for a booklet, he laughed about it when he told us but said he was exhausted, frustrated and barely slept to get it done.
I also felt like I could relate to some of the things he said about his work about style and media. He mentioned that he enjoyed and wanted to include collage but it wasn’t his strong point and distracted you from his line drawings. He went onto talk about how he started to use Photoshop to put his work together, which is something I have started to teach myself and still not great at. Ben said that a lot of his earlier work tended to be on white background as he found it difficult to change with having layers on ‘multiply’ which is something I struggle with, he said to just work at it and in time your skills will only get better.
Ben had quite a lot of stories to tell and advice to give us, which I’m sure we all found extremely helpful. He also answered many questions we all had about his work and the progression of his style.
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