Braemar Finance

Art direction and illustrations
Shortlisted for CreativePool Illustration awards

What do funerals, teeth, pets and eyesight have in common?

They share two things:
1 They’re not cheap!
2 Adverts about them tend to be a little predictable.

The brief was to promote the services of a company called Braemar Finance, who act as a link between business and customer, funding these expenses.

Due to tight timings, I was responsible for creating the illustrations as well as the art direction of the ads in print and online too.

To really stand out from the crowd, I felt that a degree of honesty in the messaging could then help to introduce a bit of humour into the ads – ‘we’re obviously not experts in dentistry, but we are in finance’.

First, a few characters were created – I was inspired by Oliver Postgate’s jerky animations of Ivor the Engine, to create slightly exaggerated poses, having seen his adjustable 2D models for those characters at the Museum of Childhood.

Then a little element of uneasy surrealism was added to the scenarios – influenced by Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico’s dream-like paintings (however the odd little train De Chirico has on the horizons was replaced by teeth, buildings and tombstones). I mixed hand drawn illustration with collage, using textures such as marble, grass, tortoiseshell to bring warmth to the scenarios.

The result was that the client’s brand was strengthened, with a recognisable, consistent style running through all their ads in a variety of trade publications, in the UK and Ireland.