Meet Our Judges: Ben Newman, Illustrator

Welcome to the thirteenth annual 3x3 International Illustration Awards, over the next several weeks we will be introducing you to our international jury of art directors, designers, publishers and illustrators.

Ben is a well established illustrator, known for his playful characters and use of bold shapes, bright colors and playful characters which has been described as ‘Bauhaus fuzzy felt.’ But life wasn't always so easy.
He studied illustration at University of the West of England in Bristol and was pretty slow out of the gate when university finished. Instead of heading straight into the market once he graduated he was still trying to figure things out and spent a long time painting and finding his voice.

Over the first couple of years he completed a few editorial pieces for the now defunct music magazine, Plan B, but mainly took part in exhibitions and concentrated on personal work. After returning from a three-month trip in Asia he realized he wanted to be an illustrator, bought his first computer and taught himself to integrate his hand drawn work into Photoshop, joined MySpace and started producing posters for gigs and the rest grew from that.

Personal projects are important to Ben. “I need the personal projects. They keep me going. They are rewarding in a way that commercial work isn’t. I don’t like sitting around doing nothing so I just make sure I keep a rhythm and routine so that personal projects just slip in naturally to my everyday.”

Ben has produced work for a large range of clients, including the Tate Modern, New York Times, BBC Radio 4, Google and Volkswagon. His practice extends outside of commercial work into worldwide exhibitions, paintings and three-dimensional collaborations. Nowadays, he spends the majority of his time collaborating on the Professor Astro Cat children’s book series with his longtime friend and scientist, Dr. Dominic Walliman, which are published by Flying Eye Books. Concurrent to working as a freelance illustrator, Newman lectures on illustration at various universities and conferences in the UK and Europe. He occasionally works as an art director for Nobrow and Flying Eye Books.

A recent film takes us inside his studio revealing how he approaches both his commercial and personal projects.

Ben will be judging our 3x3 Picture Book Show.

www.bennewman.co.uk

The 3x3 International Illustration Awards Show is open to all illustrators in all countries. There is a separate jury for each of our three shows: Professional, Student and Picture Book. For full details download our Call for Entries pdf, to enter go to our homepage.

Deadline: March 25, 2016