Last week Aldi published a new film called Hunger. A campaign working side by side with Marcus Rashford MBE supporting child poverty in the UK, and pledging to donate 10 million meals to hungry children this year.

I was very lucky to work on the illustration for the film, with words written by the brilliant Giles Andreae. 

When I started coming up with the artwork for Hunger it was a process of firstly inventing the image for the Hunger character while Giles was busy writing the poem. 

I literally started with a pile of paper, my kids (aged 4 & 6) opposite me at the kitchen table and a BIG brainstorm. We wanted an imposing, annoying ‘something’ but the something to be not too scary, just very needy and irritating. After scribbling down initial thoughts I took to one of my favourite techniques, Mono Printing. It’s great as you have to draw back to front and I find this free’s up my mind a bit when trying to create something new. 

Randomly we had also been reading about anteaters and their ravenous, insatiable, clingy ways which seemed to be a fitting association to the hunger character, hence the large nose. 

We (my little team and I) then selected our favourites from pages of initial drawings, I worked into each of these then sent thoughts over to the team at Aldi. And the hunger character was created.

I then had the pleasure of bringing Giles’ wonderful words to life creating scenes and characters for each storyboard for the animation.

See previous posts for the finished film and some more behind the scenes interviews.