[MAIN IMAGE: by Jasu Hu, New Talent winner – Advertising & Design category]  

The international AOI Illustration Awards are held annually and work by award winners, category winners and selected shortlisted artists is exhibited in the Terrace Rooms at Somerset House in London before it embarks on a tour across the UK. The national tour receives approximately 40,000 visitors.

The 2014 winning work by category is published online and in a special publication.

There are two overall winners, professional and new talent.

The AOI Illustration Professional Award 2014 went to Geoff Grandfield 

“The text was the key, I was keen to represent both the subject of Alexander as an extraordinary character and his world and the interpretation and staging that Mary Renault had made across the three novels in her trilogy. Her selection of events as known/recorded are dramatised in an increasingly powerful way vividly showing the increasingly epic scope of his short life. Each picture I made attempted to convey a narrative idea that would visually add to this approach.” [Varoom 27: the AOI magazine] 

AOI Illustration New Talent Award 2014 went to William Grill 

“For me projects always start off as messy drawings in sketchbooks, this is where I’m most relaxed and where I make the drawings I’m happiest with. So I tried to work loosely as I would in sketchbook, which is harder than it seems when you’re aware it’s a final drawing, but it was important to me that the drawings looked alive and weren’t too finished.” [Varoom 27: the AOI magazine]