Joe Wilson

Joe Wilson
http://joe-wilson.com/
http://wilson-joe.tumblr.com/

I wish i'd done either of these lovely bird pictures. The bottom Pheasant is what first caught my eye but the top Owl is my favourite because of the spot colour. As we all know i love black and yellow together because yellow is my favourite colour and is so good at catching your eye when contrasted with black. The drawings are amazingly acurate but with a slightly wooden tiles feel, the feathers on the owl don't look like soft feathers but hard, like glass scales.
The pheasant image is clearly a front cover though his image isn't marred in anyway by the large typography. His work is very textural but made with varying line rather than scanned in textures and rubbings. There is such fine detail on the beak compared to the strong lines on the white feathers. All his images are very basic, there's no unecessary frilly border or background, just the subject and plenty of negative space. It'sillustration via graphic design principles and i love it.

Here is my response to Wilson's work but my take on it:

I have been toying with the idea of drawing mushrooms for a while now but never found the right place or feel for it untill i saw Wilson's work. I find mushrooms fasinateing: they're somewhere in between plants and animals and spend 90% of their lives going unnoticed rotting down plant matter. We only see them when they're reproducing. They are often a sight that something (like a log) has been still for a long time, so i thought it would be interesting to have them growing out of something that goes fast, though it also pokes fun at people who have lovely old cars but leave them to rot on their driveway. It could also be interpretted as showing that no matter how smart man thinks he is he will always be at the wim of nature, and no matter how advanced his technology, nature will always conquer in the end.