Interview : Rob Dunlavey (1)
Rob Dunlavey is an illustrator after my own heart. I love his work, especially his animal designs, since his approach is similar to mine. He took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions. I have split this interview into several posts so that I can show off his art. You can see lots of his work on his website and on his blog. Or even better, buy a mug.
Q: Those ABC mugs you sell were the first things I noticed. What made you decide to create illustrations for mugs?
A: I’d fiddled with ABC books or other ABC subjects over the years. Just as side projects. They never got too far off the ground. Finally, I sketched out the mug ideas. Why mugs? I’m not really sure. Maybe it’s because I could easily self-publish/prototype the concept and I wouldn’t feel bad taking things to a finished state. I’m still a bit intimidated by book making and that whole process. With this project I could focus on just making pleasing designs for a very specific one-off format: an image that wrapped around a 12 oz ceramic cylinder.
One of the most pleasing aspects of doing the mug designs was to work with one basic concept and make it visually dynamic, colorful and humorous if possible (a necessity really) but not make it a cartoon animal. Some of them are cartooney but my style tries to be bright, cleaner and design-oriented. And the design’s vector style is critical to this approach. I would generally do some loose sketches in pen or pencil and then scan them in and start drawing shapes from there. Each design ends up being a little canvas that you hold in your hand so, the element of movement, time and even storytelling (in a very simplified way) are possible in the final mug.My favorite animal: In this series I like the Dog and the Skunk. The Unicorn is very pretty too. The ABC Mugs are out there. No licensee has discovered them yet. That should change because they seem like a very commercially viable design. Anyway, I’m busy working on other things, most notably, paintings of birds and other things for an exhibit in December 2008.