Brighton Naked Bike Ride poster

I love drawing clothes and fashion, as evidenced by my work in progress Satin and Tat, and much of my previous work including Everything My Daughter Wore…

So it was quite a surprise to find myself working on an illustration where everyone had to be naked! All for a good cause though: the annual Brighton Naked Bike Ride poster.

And I was happy to oblige, given my love of bikes, my belief that we need to challenge car culture, and, clearly, a need for self-punishment given that bikes are notoriously hard to draw (fortunately I’d had a recent bit of practice since the principal character in Satin and Tat gets about by bike).

Here’s the finished design:

And here it is with a tight crop and the wording added:

I’m really looking forward to seeing it around town: people have already been sending me photos of where they’ve spotted it.

(Thanks Scotty H, BNBR and Inksplattery)

One challenging aspect of this commission is that the design had to work equally well for an A3 sized poster, and for the tiny business card sized flyers that the ride also creates each year (they’re easy to put onto parked bikes to help spread the word). My first, rational thought was that I should stick with bold shapes, nothing complex, and that if I could design it at the smaller size it would scale up well into the larger one.

As you can see, I then went on to completely ignore my own advice, coming up with a very intricate picture. The crazy thing is, I think it works, even at the tiny size.

It was a real honour to be asked, especially as I’ve had one of the previous artists, Mike Levy‘s own small cards framed and up on my wall for years (click the images to see them bigger).

This might be the first year I actually take part in the Naked Bike Ride. I’ve been an appreciative spectator for many years, but it seems like the right time to take the plunge and actually join in.

I will be taking full advantage of the ‘bare as you dare’ maxim though. In my case, that’s… not very bare.