The Food & Health Innovation Service commissioned me to illustrate a Scotland food map animation. They commissioned me through the design agency “The Gate Worldwide“. I created a food map recently for a personal project which they saw and they asked me to illustrate a “Scotland Food Map” which they would then turn into an animation to use in their video “Developing Scotland’s Appetite for Healthy Innovation“.

I have worked with “The Gate Worldwide” for as long as my illustrator business has ran. I have always had great experiences working with them and they are great people to work with. They always give me a lot of freedom with my creativity and respect my ideas and efforts. I know a lot of time illustrators are not allowed to say a word about how the final work should look like but I found that the illustrations I have created usually look better if my client is willing to give me a little bit of freedom to work as I want to.

The art director for this project emailed me an eight page PDF file before we had a chat on the phone to discuss some of the details for this project. This was a delight as it gave me a clear message as to what they wanted and also the fact they had seem my previous map illustration and wanted something very similar made this a very fun and relatively easy project to work on. It also saved a lot of time from discussing ideas but for reference here is a hyperlink for my previous map illustration.

I thought this project was going to take 2-3 weeks to illustrate due to the sheer amount of detail and number of illustrations required but I actually finished the whole map in just 10 days. A map illustration usually takes me around 2-3 weeks to research, sketch and illustrate but in this instance it was a lot quicker.

So here is the video and I hope you enjoy it: