Illustrator Alan Dunne’s magical selection of Christmas stamps commission by An Post have landed him a shortlist nomination at the World Illustration Awards. Joining him from this isle is Alé Mercado for his organic landscape backdrops created for the live show version of the West Cork podcast. They were selected for the final shortlist of 200 projects from 4,300+ entries submitted by illustrators from 79 countries.
“I loved the challenge of creating something very different when asked to illustrate the Christmas stamps for An Post. What I particularly like about papercraft – the art form I used – is the textural, tactile and hand-made nature of the approach and what it brings to the image’s design. It creates little shadows and highlights on the paper edging, imperfections and roughened surfaces,” says Dunne.
“The process involved cutting out scenes from coloured paper. They were then constructed into layered, theatrical set-like dioramas, with back, middle, and foreground elements consisting of characters and props, which I carefully lit and photographed in my studio.”
“When we first came across Ale Mercardo’s work, we knew immediately that it was just what we were looking for. We were scheduled to do a live show of our podcast ‘West Cork’ and were trying to think of ways to make it interesting to look at so that it wouldn’t just be two people standing on stage,” says Jennifer Forde from the podcast.
“We started to look around for someone who might be able to help us out – and soon came across the haunting, moving, evocative work of Mercado. In record time, he selected a few scenes from our script and set about creating a series of incredibly beautiful illustrations that were very lightly animated – the steady rotating lighthouse off the rocky coastline, stormy clouds drifting over the Palais de Justice in Paris, smoke from a west cork cottage chimney. Together with the live score by cellist Wes Swing, this all amounted to so much more than the sum of their parts. Ale perfectly captured the mood of our work, and transported the audience to the very heart of the story.”
