Jason Ford
Stuff that has influenced me
- superheroes, superhero fingerpuppets
- record sleeves (beatles)
- pop art imagery
- comics (archie as purehart the powerful) colours, print, ragged edges of pages, poor print quality
- walt disney
Belgian comics (Blake et Mortimer). Belgian comics are very much unlike American ones. They are beautifully printed, hard cover books with serious stories and very high quality drawing.
Maurice Tillieux: Gil jourdan
Jack Kirby’s Marvel comics. Amazing futuristic scenes, machines, ridicolous stories like superman vs frankenstein
- Children’s activity books. Reduced shapes, limited colour palette, leaves a lot up to the imagination
- Comic lettering. Huge drop shadows, conveys excitement
Men Only magazine covers (1940s). Loose linework, flat colour
Never mind the bollocks, here’s the sex pistols
Saul Steinberg: The Discovery of America
Hergé: Tintin, End Papers
Go 2 Record Sleeve. “This is a record cover. This writing is the design upon the record cover […]”
My own work
- Mostly editorial illustration
- Advertising for Ben and Jerry’s Foundation
- Gravitylight, We walk the line
- Own work as a break from comercial work
- Editorial jobs give you all sorts of different subjects to work on, most random stuff
Stuff I look at
- Shop signage
- Lettering
- Ice cream vans
- Neon signage
- Random stickers
- Lettering with snow on top
- Straightforward shop names
Process
- Pencil drawings
- Brush and ink black line art
- Digital colouring
- Very rarely meet my own clients (all through email, agency)
- Work from a shared studio
Super Book for Superheroes
- workshops with kids
- book has developed into its own thing
- The Superhero Comic Kit
- Coming up: Superhero Adventure Playset (paper engineering, pop-up book)
Questions
Do you have any advice for finding a good workspace?
- We just replied to an ad
- The market is getting more competetive
- Renting a place is definitely a learning process
- Find a group of people you like working with and set up a studio with them
- People will change over time
- Split the rent between a number of people