Illustration & poster for the Welsh Music Foundation

Production music is the music you hear in the background when you're watching a TV drama or such like - royalty-free music that helps add to the on-screen emotional effect. We're making a lot of television in Wales at the moment, and will be making a lot more - but the Welsh Music Foundation is concerned that only a tiny percentage of the production music used in Welsh programmes is actually made in Wales. It's coming up with a guide to help labels, composers and general musical bods create homegrown music for Welsh programmes, and commissioned yours truly to come up with an illustrated poster for an event they're holding to promote said guide. So I thought, how can I illustrate music on TV?

I started off with a doodled pencil drawing of all this drama coming out of an old TV set. Detectives, guns, dogs, children playing, robots, people kissing etc. All this drama would be loosely contained in the five lines of a musical stave (if that's the right term - I only have grade 1 piano).

Once I was happy with the doodle I got out a paintbrush and commenced inking the drawing. Inking allows you to define lines quickly, giving a hierarchy to the illustration and allowing you to scan, clean up and manipulate the drawing in Photoshop a lot easier.

So then I added the stave, colours and textures - I went for a kind of pink/orange/brown look at first but then changed to green to fit the WMF's logo:

You get a really nice texture with ink that I think is difficult to replicate with vector art. I added half-tone patterns for a little roughness and depth. Am particularly proud of the gun and the robot:

So here are the finished posters, in English and Welsh: