If you read DEVELOP3D magazine we hope you’ve enjoyed the wonderful designs and illustrations of Rob Biddulph. Remember the Zombie inspired Death of SolidWorks or any one of these glorious covers?
What you might not know is Rob is also the award-winning art director of the Observer Magazine and has just become a published author!
His first picture book, Blown Away, follows Penguin Blue and his friends as they go on a gloriously illustrated adventure full of good ideas, homesickness and the perils of kites.
Published by HarperCollins, it’s a wonderful story for kids (and for the parents that read them). It’s available today in the UK, New Zealand or Australia, but readers in the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, Greece, Italy, Spain & Catalonia will have to wait until next year. Yes, it’s going global.
We wish Rob every success – he really is an exceptional talent and all altogether top bloke. We just hope he doesn’t forget us at DEVELOP3D when he’s rich and famous!
Here are a few tasters of the book, including some development shots.
For the budding graphic designers and illustrators out there you may be interested to learn about his process.
“My drawings all start out as pencil sketches. Sometimes I’ll add a bit of water colour too,” he explains. “It takes quite a bit of sketching to perfect a character, and it’s not until I can draw them in any position and from any angle that I’m ready to get them onto the computer. To do that, I scan them in and redraw them in Photoshop with a pressure sensitive digital paintbrush on a Wacom tablet.”
Not that different to conceptual product design then!
Follow Rob on:
Instagram: @rbiddulph
Twitter: @RobBiddulph
Web: RobBiddulph.com
You can buy Blown Away here.
Meanwhile, check out these summer holiday children’s puzzles that appeared in the Observer last Sunday.
