At the Royal College of Art summer show this year I was also impressed with the work of Tom Radclyffe, who created a fictional cityscape entitled Blue Cities for Crystal Globes. He was on the MA Visual Communication course and is now carving out a career as an illustrator. His images are hand drawn and intensely detailed, inspired by ‘paper architecture’ and the built environment. He says:
This project looked to explore how I could construct my own world, focusing on the organic manufacture of the city and exploring my own reality. I designed the project so it allowed me to push my imagery while exploring a subject I was really interested in.
The creation of the project was very organic, I felt this was key to the idea. I didn’t want to plan or force the images as I thought this would show in the drawings. When presenting work in a grid, I am really interested in how the imagery can follow through from one tile to the next. However, I resisted designing this to happen and instead allowed it to occur naturally. I wanted to really push how I could draw from my imagination, while at the beginning I used various sources to draw from by the end of the project I was able to manufacture the city completely from my own imagination.
