Design Inspiration: Matthew Jennings
Hello all! For month of April we have Matthew Jennings as our Design Inspiration. Matt is Graphic Media Specialist at Industrial Artworks UK. Matt is a veteran Technical Illustrator with two and half decade of experience. He has been working through pre-digital era rOtring pens to digital-era 3D visualisation and CAD. Matt currently resides in Central Switzerland with a full time position in the Aviation Industry working in vector illustration , 3D modelling, interactive e-Learning development and graphic design. Matt creates the much needed Standard Parts Libraries on his website. Lets welcome Matt on Medium’s Technical Illustration publication.
Matt, I am interested to know about your beginning in the graphics field? What inspired to get you into the field of Technical Illustration?
Hello all, I have been a Technical Illustrator for 25 years. My journey into Technical Illustration began at Foundation Art and Design college. I had to pick three subjects to study in depth. I chose Stained Glass Window Making and Clay Modelling, I couldn’t choose another from the huge list the lecturers gave us until l saw ‘Technical Illustrator’ I asked a tutor what this was and he told me -
“Its where you can see through the engine to all the gears on the inside.”
I immediately knew what this was and chose that, I was hooked; I was the only one in 90 students who chose Technical Illustration, most saw it as an non-creative and boring subject but I loved it! From there it was to Blackpool & The Fylde college. The three years of studying culminated in a cutaway of a Ferrari Testarossa using the airbrush technique. In employment, I worked in Germany, Switzerland and Canada mainly freelancing before coming back to Europe to set up my own company, Industrial Artworks.
What is your style of work Employed, freelance or somewhere in between?
I am currently employed full time at Pilatus Aircraft in the Ground Based Training Division in Switzerland. This is my first permanent job after working for myself and running my own Illustration/design company for many years. I also enjoy creating my vector libraries in my spare time which I sell from my site Industrial Artworks.
Everyone has a favourite project what’s yours? Also, it will be interesting for us to know the current and future projects you have in the pipeline.
I like all sorts, from a complex cutaway to the simple pleasure of turning an old scan through over-trace back into a clean well drawn line illustration. At work, I am currently going through and vectorising a series of maintenance illustrations for the legendary PC-6 aircraft. Although simple, this gives me great satisfaction knowing you are bringing these illustrations up to modern standards for another 50 years of service. I’m still a big fan of the traditional cutaways of cars which is what inspired me to do technical illustration in the first place. I would like to do more of these in the future; starting on the board for construction and finishing on the computer. I am currently working on a VW Beetle cutaway which is proving to be quite a challenge!
You have created an awesome set of libraries, tell us something about it, like how did you decide to create them. We as Tech-Illustrators face this issue daily, it is like we need something and we cannot find a vector for it easily, we find your library pretty productivity booster in such times!
Borne out of the fact that I had been illustrating for years, and it was always the same bits that took time, the non-isometric bolt, the hands, springs etc. Surely someone has done this? I looked on many sites and found a few libraries which were expensive, with not many components and sometimes not very well drawn, it was then I knew I had something to offer. I decided to create my own collections which I use daily in my work and sell on the web which is easy to set up with today’s eCommerce solutions. For the future, I plan to release some Operator Libraries like hand illustrations; these always slow me down as they are so different from the usual engineering components we draw.
What are the tools of the trade you use to create your work?
I use Adobe Illustrator as my weapon of choice, in my opinion, still the best vector editor out there despite some obvious weak areas but luckily Astute Graphics are filling a lot of these. I also use a lot of actions and a keystroke recorder called iKey to automate some procedures. I also use PTC’s IsoDraw CAD-process and MOI 3D to create, modify and extract information from 3D CAD data. For the 3D visualisation pieces I use Modo from The Foundry.
Do you wish if there was one thing you could have done differently and you would if you could time-travel in a Time Machine?
Nothing major, I’m glad I stuck at technical illustration as there aren’t as many illustrators around now and I can see that we are being valued a bit more now than in recent years. I wish I had continued with traditional painting and pencil drawing in my spare time which we also learnt at college; this gave me a lot of satisfaction and also made you really think what you were doing. In the computer work process its all too easy to become over-reliant on software and become lazy. Maybe I’ll get back into this with my airbrush cutaways.
What allows you to jump out of the bed everyday and rush to work?
Any mantra or a personal philosophy behind your craft and work?
Are there any deep reasons other than making the ends meet?
Well, I was never much good at school except for Art and Technical drawing so it was an obvious choice for a career, however, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else now. I do like to see different aspects of art but I have to admit that I am always drawn to more precise and well crafted illustration which comes more from commercial art than contemporary art which leaves me cold. I am always amazed by some the best Hyper Realistic art out there just because I can appreciate the talent it takes to do. For my own work I still get a great sense of achievement when someone looks at my work and can then understand the working principle of a complex piece of machinery. To summarise, its great way to pay the bills! :)
What would be your advice for visual Technical communicators just starting out?
Learn some 3D modelling and rendering. It is very hard to be just a 2D vector technical Illustrator these days and so you need some extra strings to your bow so to speak. Also the vast resource of data in 3D is growing all the time, I rarely have to draw something from plans these days as the subject matter usually exists as 3D CAD data. So the ability to manipulate this data to create both vector and raster assets is essential. That said, not everything is in 3D and so when you are asked to draw these missing elements it becomes even more paramount that you know how to illustrate so that the end result matches the finished quality of the 3D model generated parts. For example in my work, aviation, the ejection seat models never have the soft bodied and flexible harness straps included — these have to be added which are not the easiest to do!
Great! A bunch of thanks to Matt for answering my questions. You can check Matt’s work by visiting his site — www.industrial-artworks.co.uk. Wish you all a great weekend.
