DAVE GOES TO OXFORD!

Actually, it was more like Oxford came to me. On a few occasions over the years, I've had the pleasure of producing art for Oxford University Press. Sometimes, that has happened through the auspices of design studios. Last time around, I was  contacted by Blue Bamboo Studios, a London firm that was packaging an educational textbook for Oxford. The art was an approximately 2/3 page image featuring a whole lot of goings-on in a shopping mall. One of the major points of the lesson was demonstrating proximity. Stores and mall-goers needed to be shown directly across from, or next to, or above other shops, restaurants, etc., even including an ice skating rink full of skaters. So, to that end, I decided it would be necessary to eschew my usual oblique perspective approach, which I usually use when showing large complex scenes and use parallel perspective instead. That way there would be no confusion as to what was where in relationship to everything else. I plotted out the perspective in blue line before penciling the finished sketch, which is something I very rarely do. As you can see from the illustration above, there was a lot of detailed information to fit into the scene, and I spent a lot of time tightening up the signage to make it as legible as possible. Friends and family made their usual cameo appearances. I missed angling the vertices like I usually do, but everyone was quite pleased with the results. I was paid in Pounds, and once again fancied myself a Rhodes Scholar, having tended to, if not attended, Oxford University!