You may have noticed a few wild illustrations cropping up in the last couple of issues of Wideopenmag – a border of hearts, bullets, bike wheels and crumpled paper … or maybe an army of tiny gremlins clawing their way out of an open wound…?
All of these doodles are one-of-a-kind, hand drawn, bespoke illustrations for Wideopenmag and are the work of Birmingham based artist and rider Gareth Weston.
Gareth’s work has been slowly creeping into the mag and adding afresh touch of style and creativity to our pages so we thought it was about time we gave him a shout!
I wrote this piece after a particularly unpleasant (yet incredibly minor) cut to my leg on a Friday night ride that left me in A&E and on antibiotics. Rather than posting up a grizzly picture of my gooey leg I got in touch with Gareth to see if he could put together something that would fit the piece. I’m stoked on how it came out (and my leg is feeling much better!).
We were struggling to come up with an image that would fit Claire Buchar’s piece in issue 16 and got in touch with Gareth to see if he could help. The cougar in the image is a reference to Claire’s mention that she and Chris Kovarik were out in Whistler and the cougars had started prowling. Claire asks “Can you imagine what a juicy meal Chris’ calves would make?!”
Unfortunately, one of the challenges with the mag is making the text and the images all fit into a super tight space and the image never made it into the mag… It was a tough one to drop it but we just couldn’t fit it in alongside the text without making it look like an afterthought. Shame!
This one is nothing to do with Wideopenmag, but I like it and it’s a great example of Gareth’s style. According to GW’s website it was a piece for the Lloyd’s TSB Art Of Nurture Competition as influenced by the theme of ‘We Make It Simple’. The piece took Gareth over 12 hours to complete and was entirely hand-drawn.
Another one I’ve picked just because I like it – This is Gareth’s winning entry to the 2010 Lunartik/Spaghetti Junction Magazine ‘Design A Lovely Cup Of Tea’ competition.
A poster GW designed for Tuborg lager. “A large poster design based upon the newly derided ‘live unleashed’ brand direction of a large Lager brand in which a lifestyle sense of excitement, energy, electricity and creativity is central with particular product focus upon 18-24 year olds that are both experimental and adventurous.”
Gareth has tried his hand at a couple of custom helmet designs in the last few months – these two are called “Earthworm” and “Ceaser”.
“Completely hand rendered custom paint job completed using only a fine liner, roll of masking tape, 2 brushes and a scalpel. More than 20 complete hours were required to entirely finish it to a satisfactory level, with very few inconsistencies and almost 100% flawless colour. All of the detailed pattern was hand-drawn with a fine liner pen and very little masking was used to create the large colour areas with most line and edge work being done using free-hand brush work. The actual design and colour scheme was entirely improvised with no pre-planning or design preparation and due to the leafy nature of the central pattern has been dubbed ‘Caeser’”
And last but not least is an illustration that Gareth drew for Richard Cunynghame’s “Why do I Ride?”. We sent GW Cunny’s words, gave him some dimensions for the ‘shape’ of the image we wanted and he came back with this. Gareth picked out items of Cunny’s words and homed in on the philosophical attempt to “answer the unanswerable” to bring this together. “This design reflects the articles evident literary symbolism regarding frustration ,repetition of thought and contemplation as visualised through the highly simplistic visualisation of both cycling and lifestyle, in combination with the repeated and densely layered and patterned use of paper balls that act as a direct metaphor for frustration developed through concentration, contemplation and the development of complex thought.”
And that’s it – Thanks to Gareth for his time, effort and talent in coming up with some amazing illustrations for Wideopenmag. We’re stoked to be working with him and looking forward to seeing what he comes up with for the future. Who knows – maybe a GW cover shot one day?!
If you’re interested in seeing more of Gareth Weston’s work – hit up http://westonillustration.carbonmade.com
If you liked this post why not check out these?
