commercial work « AdamCadwell.com

commercial work

LEGO Lord of the Rings Celebrities

Warner Bros. were so pleased with my work creating minifigures to send to celebrities to promote the LEGO Batman 2 videogame, that they asked me to create even more for the LEGO Lord of the Rings game! Of course I was thrilled to take up the challenge again and received lots of free LotR sets so I could use the minifigure parts from them. Or to put it another way that would thrill the 8 year old me: Warner Bros. sent me free LEGO and paid me to play with it. It’s a tough life sometimes.

There’s plenty of photos of all the celebrities I made in my LEGO Creations gallery or on my Flickr.

I can’t wait for the next LEGO videogame to come out!

LEGO Superhero Celebrities for LEGO Batman 2

A couple of months back, I was contacted by the PR company for LEGO Batman 2 and asked if I could create superhero versions of UK celebrities using only official LEGO parts to promote the launch of the game on June 22nd. Of course, I said I’d be thrilled to. The celebs I heard back from, the PR company and Warner Bros. were all thrilled with the results. Here are most of the mini-figures that I made.

Jonathan Ross and Jane Goldman

Simon Pegg

Peter Serafinowicz

Peter was so happy with his villainous mini-figure that he made it his Twitter icon and kindly @ mentioned me too.

Alan Carr

Ant & Dec

Fearne Cotton

Chris Moyles & the BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Team

I also built their recording studio.

KISS FM Radio Breakfast Team

This is Melvin, Charlie and Rickie. In the end the radio studio set was sent to these guys instead and they seemed really happy with it even going as far to pose as their LEGO selves:

Loose Women

From L-R: Carol Vorderman, Denise Welch, Janet Street-Porter and Andrea McLean. I never thought I’d be paid to make a LEGO Superhero Janet Street-Porter.

It was a lot of fun to make these and come up with different Superhero costumes without using any Batman, Superman or Marvel LEGO. Needless to say I’m nearly out of tiny capes.

commercial work / illustration — 2 Comments
27
Mar 12

Jack White for MOJO

This month’s MOJO magazine (the May 2012 issue with Steve Marriott on the cover) is out today and contains a full page illustration of mine of Jack White to accompany the featured review of ‘Blunderbuss’. I was chuffed to see it used on the Contents page too.

Big thanks to Jamie McKelvie for passing my name onto the reviewer Andrew Male and thanks to Art Editor Mark Wagstaff for being a pleasure to work with on a tight deadline.

As a fan of the White Stripes this was a dream assignment and having a full page of a magazine to play with is a rare treat. I hope to grace the pages of MOJO again soon.

comics / commercial work / illustration — No Comments
8
Nov 11

Shorties!

On Sunday, Jonathan Cape released ‘Shorties!’ their free eBook of the best of the Graphic Short Story Prize, an annual contest in which the winning entry is published in The Observer and the creator receives £1000. The collection contains the winning entries from the first 5 years of the prize and a selection of other entries chosen by none other than Bryan Talbot. I was very pleased when they asked to include my 2007 entry ‘Spilt Soda’ in the book. I can’t tell you how surprised, pleased, thrilled and honoured I was when they asked me if I would design and illustrate the cover. I have to thank editor Alex Bowler for taking such an interest in my work.

You can read ‘Shorties!’ online, download an iBooks version for your lovely tablet or print out the whole thing HERE.
Alternatively, you can read it all on The Guardian’s website here.

I told you November would be a busy month!

As a bonus, here are my roughs for the three ideas I sent to the editors:

Click for larger image.

commercial work / Lego / news — No Comments
2
Nov 11

LEGO Shortlist

Back in January I was thrilled to have my Lego Mad Men featured on Shortlist Magazine’s website. Not long after, the guys there told me the feature had gone down really well and they’d like to commission me to see what else I could do with my minifigure collection. Perhaps recreate some of their covers in Lego? Okay!

I’ve recreated 7 of their past covers using only official Lego minifigures featuring the “uncanny” likenesses of Simon Pegg, Richard Branson, John Hamm, Martin Scorsese, Christian Bale, Paul McCartney and (the one I’m most pleased with) Jimi Hendrix.

See them all over on Shortlist.com, where they say very nice things about me (cheers, guys!) and there’s some extra photos in this Flickr set too.

commercial work — 1 Comment
22
Sep 11

‘You Got To Go’ music video

Click for larger image.

Here’s a storyboard I did for a scene in the music video for ‘You Got To Go’ where the band themselves, Above & Beyond, make a cameo.

Time was against me for this job, so I drew some very light pencils and drew most of the details straight in ink, which is rare for me, and what do you know, it didn’t turn out horrible. Once I’d added the pale, sepia tones I was actually pretty happy with it.

The band look different than in the publicity photo I was given for reference but the lead guy and girl look really similar even though I wasn’t given any reference! Weird. Also, the overloaded old car was swapped out for a cool VW van and the roadside diner was actually the Koffee Pot in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.

Here’s a Making Of for the video, where the storyboard pops up at the 0:50 second mark, followed by the full video itself.

comics / commercial work — No Comments
28
Jul 11

HF4U Comic Competition

I often teach short cartooning workshops for primary school kids at the World of Work events organised by Higher Futures 4U and they always seem to go down well with the children and teachers alike. So Ana at HF4U had the idea of running a Comic Competition with schools in the North West and asked me if I’d like to be involved. I agreed of course and drew up a 4 page tips sheet on how to draw comics featuring the HF4U mascot, Sam, to be sent out to schools. I was shocked when Ana told me they’d received over 500 entries in return! Ana and her team whittled them down to a top 25 and Ana and I picked 15 winners and runners up, all of which you can see here. The prize for 1st place was a set of art supplies, a print making set for the school and the winning entry re-drawn by me. Out of 500+ entries the most entertaining, funny, well written and imaginatively drawn entry was ‘The Dream Catcher and the Tomatoes’ by Anvay Sudame, age 11!

Here’s Anvay’s winning entry followed by my version of it.

I had a great time interpreting Anvay’s comic, I kept as close as possible to his original layout and colour choices. I love Anvay’s character designs for the aliens and the Police chief (check out all the pouches!) and the little details like the Alien Leader having four voices. The tomato gun was great fun to draw too. It’s really a good comic I think, his writing goes further than the ‘Sam gets back to Earth okay’ point, which a lot of other entries ended on, and his art is very consistent and detailed. He also knows how to use a good special effect too!

Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending the assembly on Anvay’s last day of school at Abbott Community Primary School in Manchester. There Ana and I presented him with his grand prize of his framed original comic, a framed print of my version, my original artwork and a copy of Paper Science 4 and 5. Anvay was quiet but clearly pleased and his Mum, who was there with all the other parents of the leaving students, was super proud and took photos of us both. Ana took the photo on the left, which I grabbed from a write up on the HF4U blog written by the star of the comic, Sam himself.

Congratulations again to Anvay and all the other winners and runners up, and thank you to Ana and Higher Futures 4U for asking me to take part in this. And if you’re a comic artist reading this, I invite you to blow Anvay’s mind and draw some fan art for him.

commercial work — 4 Comments
8
Jun 11

Vimto TV advert

Most people who know me could tell you that my favourite drink ever is Vimto. It’s not a drink for everyone, it can be too sweet for some and others can’t get past the fact it’s an anagram of vomit, but for me it’s one of my all time favourite flavours. I love it.

So when I got the call, back in February, asking if I was available to draw a storyboard for an new Vimto TV advert, I was somewhat giddy. “Will I get to draw the little fruit guys?” I asked. “Oh yes, ” they said “and they’ll be driving a Chevy lowrider.” Needless to say I enjoyed this job a lot, even though it was a quick turnaround of 41 coloured frames in 2 days!

Now that I spotted the finished advert on TV last night (this is usually how I find out an advert has been successfully made) I am free to show you my work on it. So here’s the advert followed by my storyboards.