Menagerie Illustration

The story behind this image needs to be told in three parts.

Firstly, Part one; the origin. A while back I was approached by a new client who were interested in commissioning me to explore a new illustrative direction for their brand. Several other illustrators were also contacted so to 'win' the pitch we were each asked to produce a piece of work responding to a few points of interpretable criteria.

Part two; the decommission. My submission to the brief was a piece not unlike the image displayed here and thankfully it secured me the contract to begin working with the client. However, in addition to the pitch-made piece never being utilised by the client for any commercial purposes, the planned change of illustrative direction for the brand never actually occurred either, making the piece wholly inadequate for its planned intent or any other at the time.

Part three; the repurpose. I was now in possession of artwork that served no objective other than to haunt the back of my mind for months to come. It bothered me to have spent so long on this piece only to have it languish on my hard drive for the rest of time, so I decided to do something about it. I found the time to breathe fresh life into it by stripping away the client-specific rhetoric and reworking some of the illustration, arriving at the result you see here. Menagerie is now an assortment of distorted hand drawn animals and plant life woven throughout an abstract geometric structure, playing on scale and perspective.