Brian Grimwood

I really like brian grimwoods work, its quite sketchy and the use of colour is really interesting. Creating patches of colour almost at random and using dark thick lines so the image pulls through the blocks of colour.

this style could be an interesting approach to use for the cover wrap, recreating the tiger logo and simplifying it in this way, incorporating blocks of orange and blue (colours used in tiger beer) to make the packaging more recognisable. I could also redo the the tiger beer typeface and make it look more japanese.

Credited by Print Magazine as having changed the look of British illustration, Brian's loose, expressive visual language is strongly ideas-led and immediately recognisable. His work is characterised by simplicity and clarity, in both line and colour.

Author: Jacquey Visick

Text:
Dip-Pen Burlesque

The Caricature Visions Of Brian Grimwood. Interview by Jacquey Visick

'I deliberately set out to get a new job every year', says Grimwood. So by the time he was 23 he was already art director with a small agency in Soho. He spent most of his creative time working out quick roughs for clients in innumerable styles, developing a kind of drawing 'shorthand' which is the backbone of his present technique.

But the trouble with working in an agency is that art directors spend more time organising, chasing up work and leaning on people than illustrating. So two years ago he decided to make the break and run his own affairs and, together with a friend, Mike Terry who was already well established, set up Hat Studio in Covent Garden.

There are two very obvious facets to his work which increasingly identify him. One is the style, bold black outlines filled in with vivid flat colours like the examples pages of children's colouring books and the other his capacity for thinking up fresh, sharp and even cruel slants on a theme.

'Obviously everyone who draws has got to have something to say and I suppose I have a really sarcastic outlook on life and tend to caricature situations'. The danger of toppling from caricature into cliche isn't lost on him even though he tends to make it difficult for himself by using 'props' which could become cliches in themselves. Snails shells appeared in many of his drawings over a period of months. His favourite example is the drawing of the 'Botticelli-like girl wearing snails shell headphones. The snails are meeting over the top of her head, dressed up in white ties and both playing violins'. The snails shells were around long enough to become recognised, but were phased out before any but the cognoscenti could say 'Oh not another of Brian's snail pictures'.

For the first six months of Hat Studio's life, Grimwood went into retreat, developing. and polishing the style by which he is now known. His tools turned up fortuitously. He delved around in a cupboard and found the old dip-pen with which he learned to write as well as three tubes of primary colour gouache and a tube of white. He wanted to find a way of working that was quick 'because jobs come in one day and you have to get the work back the next'.

The result looks determinedly slick, 'that's the result of ten year's experience', but amazingly lively, considering that the colour is so flat that it almost looks as if it has been screen printed. 'There's a good reason for that, it's a hell of a lot harder to do shading!' But it maddens him when clients say, 'How do you get the colour on so evenly', so engrossed by the technique that they forget about the idea.

When starting out on his own, he sifted through all kinds of magazines to pick out those with the best standards of photography and layout and the most generous acreage of illustrations. The titillation press were way out in front. But he is also working on a children's book, which is now ripe for a publisher, as well as giving time to the committee of the newly formed Association of Illustrators where he regards himself very much as representative of young illustrators at the bottom of the ladder.

http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/diad/article.php?title=308&year=1974&article=d.308.36