Designers We Love: Thomas Burden

INTERVIEWED BY Lindi Brownell Meiring

British 3D illustrator Thomas Burden first caught our eye when we spotted him in Handsome Frank’s A Little Film… About Thomas Burden. We just had to find out more about this creative talent and his quirky-cool story.

When did you decide 3D illustration was for you?

I’ve always been quite technically minded. When I was a kid, my Dad ran a building company, and my Mum was really creative, so there was always a technical drawing board in our house and lots of art materials. I’d always practice drawing architectural elevations and stuff like that as well as drawing and painting, so I was thinking in 3D from quite a young age.

I suppose I first realised that 3D illustration was my calling when I discovered that you could really crudely fake 3D in Adobe Illustrator. That was in about 2008, when I was working at McFaulStudio. It was around the same time that I first heard of Cinema4D, when we hired animators to work on a Nokia project and they turned my flat vector work into a 3D world. It was pure alchemy! From then I started to dabble in the odd, online tutorial, but I was mainly concentrating on learning Adobe After Effects at the time. It wasn’t until 2012 that I felt knowledgeable enough in 3D to do an actual paid project with it.

Nostalgia appears to play a very important part in your work. Why is this?

I was lucky enough to have a pretty idyllic childhood. I grew up sailing and skiing and travelling, so our house (and my grandparent’s house, which was like a Wes Anderson set) was full of various alpine souvenirs and indigenous art that my parents collected, along with various bits of old boating junk and knick-knacks from car boot sales that my mum found interesting.

I was always encouraged to be creative and was allowed to draw murals about the house and stuff like that. So I guess I started taking note of a lot of visual references from an early age. This all combined with the fact that I wasn’t really allowed any toys as a kid, so I’d always be scouring the toy catalogues, looking at all the brightly coloured things that I couldn’t have. In my work I try to convey that nostalgic trip through my vague recollections in as true a sense as possible, letting everything mix and slightly distort along the way. I don’t like to create pastiches, but rather I prefer to mix up all these influences and present them in the same way that they are jumbled up in my memories; to create something new, but clearly rooted in the past. How you remember stuff as a kid is probably better than how it actually was, so I like to convey that in my work by maximising colours and textures as much as possible. I think that’s why my biggest influences have been Wes Anderson and Mark Ryden. I can really relate to their inspirations and how they combine all these nostalgic elements into something new and hyper real.

You’re a collector at heart. If you had to choose one thing in your home that you love to collect the most, what would it be?

It’s a tough decision between cuckoo clocks and dolls in national costume. I already have quite a few of both. Cuckoo clocks are just universally awesome, especially the cheaper, painted ones with Bavarian wenches on a swing as the pendulum. Dolls in national costume are a bit weird, in an “it’s a small world” kind of way, but it’s just that they always have awesome colour combinations and traditional patterns. Folk art, costume and patterning is something I’ve always been drawn to.

You’ve done a lot of work for prestigious publications and clients around the world, including Wall Street Journal, TimeOut, Nike and the Washington Post. Is there a particular design you created that you’re most passionate about?

Working for prestigious publications is great, but ultimately it’s the project that interests me. I did a piece for The New Yorker are few weeks ago, which was great for the kudos, but I wouldn’t actually put it in my portfolio, as it doesn’t quite fit. My absolute favourite client so far has been Norwegian Airlines’ in-flight magazine, published by Ink Publishing. Rickard, the art director there has given me a string of awesome briefs, from creating a series of crazy Swedish themed pop music machines, to a Budapest-themed pinball machine and a Wikipedia entry-writing robot. Those are the briefs that I think have best suited my style and have given me the most freedom. One of my first-ever 3D illustration jobs, for a Canadian hiphop-puppeteering group called The Fungineers has always remained a favourite too. I did their EP artwork and website way back in 2012, and that was the first job where I realised that I’d finally got a style of my own that I was really happy with.

What are your plans for 2015?

My first goal for 2015 is to relaunch my website, which should be happening by February. I’ve got the design all finalised and now I’m getting on with designing all the smaller details like promos and newsletters whenever I have some spare time, which doesn’t happen much, hence the delay. I also really want to start doing more motion stuff as well. It was great to start animating some bits of my work for the Little Film that my agents, Handsome Frank made about me, and I’d really love to do more stuff like that. I think it’s the most logical next step with my work.

Aside from that, 2015 should see me getting out of the studio a bit more too, hopefully. I’ll be off to New York in April to plaster the place with promotional material before heading off on a whirlwind world tour towards the end of the year, stopping off at a few countries to show agencies my work… and pictures of my cat.

To view more of Thomas Burden’s work, visit therewillbeunicorns.com or handsomefrank.com.