The work I did for season 2 of The Tourist encompases some of my favourite pieces I’ve made so far in my career, none so much as Helen’s pulp novels. Rachael trusted me with a lot of illustration work during my time on The Tourist and it was a phenomenal opportunity to explore different styles, periods and movements.
I needed an expressionistic JB Yeats style painting of the Kilgal Distillery to be blown up and put over the panes of glass separating the distillery and the museum. Neville Gaynor, master painter and very kind person, very thoughtfully found a second life for my original physical painting in Donal’s house over the bar.
A particiularly fun prop for the museum set was the button stand next to the waxwork of the mysterious Elliot Stanley. Our intrepid hero can’t resist hitting the button for info on the figure - even if it accidentally gives his location away. I don’t tend to draw animals a lot so this was certainly a fun opportunity to do so.
The Taxi office’s back room was a set I came to know fairly intimately by the end of the shoot. The script called for a claustrophobic cacophany of records as our characters try to find a metaphotical needle in a haystack and, of course, every document they had to painstakingly pour over had to be painstakingly designed, crafted, and doused in dirty down.
Hospital wayfinding -a.k.a. every Graphic’s trainees’ bread and butter. Drumleigh Hospital’s logo took on various incarnations but in the end the simplest version won out, matching the comtemporary feel of the hospital overall.
Ironically one of my last pieces on The Tourist also happened to be one of the last shots in the show. While I was sorry to have to hand off the final file I was equally delighted to see it in its final incarnation thanks to the magic hands of one Rachel McCabe.