23 February 2024

Chris Wormell Illustrates Cadbury’s 200 year Anniversary

Posted in: Advertising, Branding, Design, Food

Chris Wormell has been commissioned by Cadbury to illustrate a vintage poster to celebrate their adverts from the past 200 years. Made as part of a series, Chris’s work is currently being shown throughout the country, on billboards, at bus stops and across social media.

 

Below Chris explains a bit more about how he created the work:

This image – Dairy Cows in a Pasture – is a linocut print. First, a sketch was made. Part of this was then traced, and the tracing transferred to the first lino block, in reverse. This block was used to create the sky and cloud colours. The lighter subtler colours of the clouds first, then the darker, richer purple of the larger part of the sky. Darker colours always print on top of lighter.

 

I used what is called the reduction printing method for this; using just one block and cutting more and more of it away as I printed the increasingly darker colours.

I then used a second block to print the landscape – pasture, trees, and distant fields – by first cutting away sky and cows and then, after printing, cutting away lighter grass tones, leaving just darker pasture and trees, then cutting away more to leave just trees, printing a new layer on the print after each cutting.

Finally, I made a third block to print the various browns of the cows.

Once the image was dry (this usually takes a day or two) it was scanned and opened in photoshop, where, on a separate file, the image of the glasses and milk was made. The process by which this image was made was basically identical to that I used to make the background landscape and cows – only without any lino, ink or lino cutting tools! I ‘cut’ into various photoshop layers made from scanned-in printed sheets.

Keeping the two images (glasses and background) separate allowed for much more flexibility with the various formats and uses of the poster.