The Knobbly Tree is the design of Adam Higton, an English illustrator, musician and designer whose output has fascinated us for a long time. His worlds seem to be populated by all sorts of strange and childlike – not childish – figures, mysterious animals and all sorts of other strange creatures, all designed in a distinctive design with a clear formal language. The photo above shows the artist during his visit to the Pumpkin Festival 2015 in Ludwigsburg.
On Instagram we followed each other for quite some time, we eyed and commented on each other’s designs and diligently forgave hearts, and at some point a comment already mentioned the possibility of a collaboration. The spark was ignited when Adam commented on our nut buddy wall hanging with “that’s exactly what I want to do” and promised to put on his “thinking cap” to create a suitable design. The motif was found quite quickly when plane trees were mentioned in the exchange – Adam was a participating artist in the Pssst! exhibition at the Zollamt/MMK (Museum für Moderne Kunst) in Frankfurt 2012/13 and could well remember the many plane trees in Frankfurt, as well as the many rabbits that prefer to populate the green spaces here.
As you can easily see on the photos Adam creates the designs by silhouette and he works FAST – in the Instagram-Chat we could hardly keep up with our comments. The final Photoshop file reached us the very next day, and after we had done the color separation for the transparencies, everything went quite fast: Three of our 110cm x 175cm screens were coated and exposed after the transparencies arrived. As with our squirrel wall hanging, our beautiful panama fabric was also used for the Knobbly Tree, a noble as well as robust fabric which is perfectly suited for wall hangings.
To describe all further details in detail would lead too far at this point, but we have documented the whole procedure in two videos – we hope you enjoy watching!
And be sure to have a look at
Adam Higtons Website!
Deutsch
