I had a contact through my website in September from Harlequin Corporate Finance looking to commission a piece of work to celebrate an upcoming deal. I couldn’t help but be a little bit nosy and ask how they had come across my work and Ian from Harlequin replied to say that he had bought one of my limited edition prints of Henley Royal Regatta from the exhibition in Marlow back in the summer and thought that my style of work may suit what he was looking for.
The brief was very specific and had to include: Tower Bridge with the Olympic rings (acknowledging that copyright for anything Olympic remains forever with the IOC), the London Eye, the Shard, the Gherkin, Monument, the number 16 and 12 and the logos of Harlequin and Six Degrees. Two pictures were required – one for Harlequin and one as a gift for Six Degrees.
Including all of these images as a ‘skyline’ and in the reconstructed but realistic way that I like to work was a fabulous challenge. In the end I decided that as long as the buildings were on the correct side of the river it didn’t really matter that you physically wouldn’t see them all from the bank of the Thames where I had chosen my view of Tower Bridge!
There were lots of lovely shapes to work with and simplify down. Being someone who collects all sorts of ephemera I looked out the copy of the FT that I keep for peachy coloured text and in a lovely example of serendipity found it was from eight years ago and had items about the Olympics in Athens! I used this for the background skyline and The Gherkin. The Shard was constructed using a section from The Daily Telegraph bought on that fantastic Friday (3 August 2012) when Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah made us proud – the item was of course talking of Sir Chris Hoy’s achievements the evening before.
To include the company logos and deal numbers I decided to use a couple of shots of boats taken on my recent holiday to St Ives. I like the way the numbers on the sails repeat as a mirror image – although it took ages to find a font that looked like I wanted it to. The girls watching from the bank are from Henley Regatta (Harlequin CF is based in Henley) – can you spot that the girl in the black jacket doesn't have any shoes on?
I really enjoyed producing these – with the bonus being that Ian was delighted with them too!
http://www.harlequincf.co.uk/news18.asp