Introducing… Jonny Ford
In our Introducing… posts, we’ll tell you a little more about the team behind the National Folklore Survey for England.
This time, we're meeting Jonny Ford, the man behind our beautiful illustrations.
Tell us a little about the day job.
If it’s one of the good days, I could be storyboarding a script or designing characters, backgrounds, colour artwork, etc. Or overseeing animators and modellers. There’s always a meeting or two… (I’ll usually be drawing through those – current obsessions are owls, mushrooms, plants, neolithic rock art and fish.)
Where can we see your work?
Currently some of my drawing work is on Instagram, and I’ve got a terrible website in very early development. It’s mostly hanging on the wall in my study, to be honest, until I stop being lazy and do something about it. Hopefully more artwork coming out for you lot [the National Folklore Survey for England] as well, and may be selling prints in the future.
And what about outside of work?
I’m usually drawing something, sketchbooks, pieces for friends or family. As a working illustrator I've had to adapt to different styles, project by project, and it’s only in the last few years I seem to have fixed on something like a style of my own. That I liked enough to share with other people, at least. It seems to mostly entail weird landscapes, creatures, made-up plants and fungi. And trying to draw water in various forms. Never realism, though – it’s more like an imagined and simplified response to landscape, ‘cos drawing trees accurately takes way too long. I do some cyanotype printing and messing about with bits of wood as well.
Have you always had an interest in folklore?
Firstly, it's a delight to work on this stuff. Being given this kind of in-depth material, and near-free range on how it can be shown, is a gift. And illustration needs material, it needs subject matter, otherwise it's doodling. Or art.
Being a kid in Northumberland, there was a steady background of folk stories all around – over-long poems about the Lambton Worm and so on. Also, I grew up in a vicarage, which I reckon makes you susceptible to ideas, gives you a sense that words and stories are powerful, as well as making you a bit weird from the beginning. It did for me anyway. Plus I had a tendency to read everything I could find. Tried to get through The Mabinogion once (being part Welsh), but never made it.
My mum was a folk singer and we’d go around the miner’s clubs as a band, playing ceilidhs, doing morris and rapper sword dancing – and there’s a lot of stories in those songs, too (usual subjects: mining disasters, press gangs, and losing your loved one at sea). So it’s familiar territory, if indirectly – but this is the first time I’ve made artwork with folklore as the subject. I once wrote an outline for a children's book based on mythical Basque giants, if that counts.
What this project is teaching me, though, is that our folklore can be continual and modern, rather than historical; it’s being revised and re-made all the time. Which may seem completely obvious but was kind of a revelation to me.
Do you have any recommendations about how someone might get into graphic design?
I'm mostly an illustrator, with an eye for design, who animates. So very general things I'd recommend to any new artists: take a good look around at what other people are doing when you're first learning technique; there's a huge amount of material around these days. This is also the trouble, as the sheer volume is terrifying and comparison is lethal – learn from it, and then most of all try to ignore them and do your own thing.
Don't be paralysed by trying to make it perfect – just do the work, do bad work on cheap paper, any sort of work (don’t show anybody if you don't want to, just chuck it in the bin and start again). But this is the process by which you get good. It's like going to the gym, without the lycra and grunting. Anybody you admire had to climb the same hill, and they will still be doing it.
When you're happy with something – then you turn the inner critic on, not before (again, this is tricky). Is it original? Is it powerful/funny/emotional/weird etc etc? Get it online, or into print, and only show the strongest pieces, if it’s a portfolio. Or make a story out of the process and build support and connections that way. Make something that stands out and send it to everyone you can think of: companies will still be looking out for new work, even if things are currently a bit weird in the creative industries.
(NB: this is more of an incoherent creative manifesto than actual careers advice.)
What’s your current project?
This week – designing a grainy, hand-drawn 2D short film about asthma. I'm doing production art right now, which I'll shortly hand off to people cleverer than me to animate.
What a talent! Designer and illustrator, Jonny Ford.
About Jonny Ford
Originally from Northumberland, Jonny went to art school in Liverpool in the mid-90s, moved to Manchester where he worked in kitchens, played in a band and tried to be a freelance illustrator before the internet properly arrived (tricky). Jonny moved to Sheffield for work and stayed. He’s now a creative director with 20-odd years in animation design covering 2D/3D illustration, animation, and live action. He is also co-founder of Finger Industries and now creative director of Ouch Health. He is also terrible at writing biographies and would rather be in water, or mooching around in the woods.
Instagram: @jonnythemook