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Today, drawing is still a big part of May’s work. He tends to start each piece away from his Mac, manually creating the physical ingredients, such as collages, drawings, paintings, felt-tip pen sketches, handwriting and photographs — even sticking things together with Sellotape, in what he describes as “essentially quite a hands-on, intuitive, constantly evolving process”.  It’s at the scanning stage that the technology kicks in. May’s core application is unreservedly Photoshop, which he uses to bring together all the different elements on the one ‘canvas’. “I approach any given project or job in any number of ways, but Photoshop is a constant”, he says. “Everything will go through Photoshop at some point — even the simplest felt-tip pen sketch”. Once that is done, he can start messing around with all the layers, using effects, looking at which texture will look good positioned on top of another. He also does a lot of cutting out, quite roughly, with the polygonal lasso tool, using it much as he would a scalpel on a cutting board.“It doesn’t always work in that order though”, he continues. “It’s quite a rough-and-ready process, and often a case of controlling the ‘happy accidents’. The most important thing is to be careful that the image doesn’t become too busy, or it can look crowded and messy — it’s all about restraint, subtlety, and the power of negative space — as any designer worth their salt knows”.  May uses Illustrator and Streamline to convert photographs into vectors, though he treats them with caution: “Streamline pops up occasionally, but is kept on the leash at all times — seems all you’ve got to do these days is put a photograph through Streamline and suddenly, hey, you’re an illustrator”. The trick is to treat the picture in Photoshop, he explains, and bring the contrast right to the top, then transfer it into Streamline, which converts the image to paths. Then you end up with a black-and-white comic-book look to images, which you can then take into Illustrator to tidy up the messy paths and add blocks of colour.Unsurprisingly, as a creative, May has always worked on the Mac platform, but there’s more to it than that: “More than anything, the Mac system is intuitive, and doesn’t get in the way of the artwork I want to produce. I don’t have the time or patience to learn something overly complex, and thankfully, finding my way around the Mac operating system is simplicity itself. Mac OS X lets me get on with my work without pulling the rug from beneath my feet if I decide to check out a Web site just as a Photoshop file saves to the drive”. May may have received more recognition in his short career than many illustrators will see in a lifetime, but he is not complacent, and his involvement with the design community through Pixelsurgeon keeps him at the cutting edge of his field. “I am constantly shifting my own goalposts, which will be the death of me before long — it certainly doesn’t help many of my clients! But, at least I don’t, on the days when my head is screwed on correctly, harbour any fine art pretensions. And I’m lucky enough to work for some very nice, patient people”. |
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