Month: December 2013

A warm and woolly knitmas dinner

| david

wooly christmas final UK

images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

I’ve recently been working with an amazing model maker and prop stylist, Jessica Dance. Her speciality at the moment is creating objects made of wool.

We’ve been working on a few woolly projects together and whilst shooting our ”Woolly mammals” series both of us mentioned that we wanted to create an image for Christmas.

I love shooting food and I always want people to do a double take with my images and spend some time working out what’s unusual about them. Over the past few years I’ve been creating faux food shots; taking classic food shots and recreating them out of everyday objects. This is where I came up with idea of using Jessica’s fantastic wool craft to turn a traditional turkey Christmas dinner into a woolly feast.

I knew the food Jessica was going to produce would look great but it wasn’t until she brought them round the studio did I realise how beautiful they would be. Some of my favourite pieces are the pigs in blankets, with it’s handmade bacon rashers, and the turkey itself with its perfectly designed drumstick. I wanted the photo, at first glance, to have the feel of a classic food shot, with it slowly revealing its true colours as you realise that something is not quite right. It was quite a challenge to light it and show off all the texture whilst keeping the warm and cosy feel of the wool.

Who’d have thought wool food could make you feel so hungry.

We Loved the final shot so much we decided to make it into a Christmas card to send out to friends and Clients. I wanted a unique greeting for the inside of the cards and came up with the line “Have a warm and woolly Christmas” Which was great, but I also wanted it to have a wool theme. So, I asked Maddy from Vue, who has been wowing me with her excellent typographic illustrations for a while now, to design a illustration for the inside. What she came up with was fantastic, and the card was ready to wing it’s way to our friends and clients.

maddy for blog

image © Madeline Macrae 2013 All rights reserved.

Processed with VSCOcam with s5 preset

It’s been a great project to work on and a chance to collaborate with some talented makers!

Hope you all have a warm and woolly Christmas and I look forward to sharing with you all of the new and exciting projects I have lined up in 2014!

Watch this space for more of mine and Jessica’s woolly faux food.

Bumper issue

| david

christmas gift guide 1 copy

christmas gift guide 2 copy

images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

Issue 69 of Monocle is out now and it’s their Christmas gift guide issue.
It’s always one of my favourite issues to work on, so I was very pleased to be asked to contribute again this year.
Richard Spencer Powell came up with a great idea to use the fantastic vitso shelving units as the backdrop to display all the lovely gift ideas that Josh had found.
I love using the vitso system it really appeals to my graphic still life side, it’s super precise and adaptable to any situation because of it’s simple timeless design.
As usual we had hundreds of items in the studio to choose from and managed to fill one of the big hire studios with it all!
I always love getting a sneak peak at all the new gifts and gadgets that are around this year.

This year I also shot all of the stylish merchandise that Monocle put their name to and sell, it was great this year to shoot the products in little sets to create a Monocle house that the products live in.

mon xmas copy

images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

The double issue is alway a busy time for everyone involved and this year Monocle also had a tie in with Grundig for me to shoot. I’m really pleased with the double page spread image that I created for them.

grundig-Lounge-f

images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

I recommend picking up this bumper issue, as always the articles are interesting, well written and if you’re struggling for gift ideas there’s something for everyone in this issue.

Woolly Mammals

| david

Woolly mammals Moose

woolly mammals Beaver

Woolly mammals Bear

images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

Over the last year myself and model maker/stylist Jessica Dance have been working on a new collaboration and I’m super happy to now be able to share the results with you.

The project came about when we were having a brain storm over a coffee. I loved the Knit heads Jess had done and thought it would be great to build a bit of a story around some new animal heads she was making for our project. We came up with the idea of them all belonging to one person and having them in different rooms of this eccentric collector of woolly mammals house.

So over the next few months we sourced various props furniture and wallpaper and created these little slices into the life of this collector.

It was such a great project to work on and Jess was great fun to work with her amazing skills with the knitting machine are second to none. I love all the little touches she brings to the project, the knitted log is one of my favourites.

The moose head set was massive and took a day to build, the moose was a huge full size moose and was 7 foot from antler tip to antler tip, and stuck out from the wall about 4 foot!

Whilst shooting we came up with lot of knitty ideas so watch this space for some more woolly madness.