One in a million sock puppets

At the beginning of the summer Tatler Magazine asked myself and Jessica Dance to collaborate to produce their luxury watch shoot for the October issue. They had the idea to create sock puppets to wear the watches, so Jess created the 8 characters to star in the story. It was a busy days shoot with a lot of watches to feature but with the watch and puppet wrangling skills of the Tatler team it all went smoothly. When we came to the end of the shoot we worked out that at one point we had around 8 million pounds worth of watches in the studio that's definitely a studio record!

images © David Sykes 2016 All rights reserved.

Stylish Comfort Food

At the beginning of the year myself and Jessica Dance were asked to collaborate on a cover shot for the London sylist magazine. The theme was Comfort food so we shot Bangers and mash and some beans on toast. The shots looked great and the cover went down very well to the point where it went viral the following week!

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

Warming comfort food

images © David Sykes 2014 All rights reserved.

Can't believe this is my first post of 2014! It's been a busy year so far, I became a dad for the first time in November last year so Poppy has been keeping us busy but I've also been busy shooting a mix of advertising and editorial shoots and of course plenty of personal projects. First off I'd like to share one of the personal projects I've been working on with the talented Jessica Dance. We've now finish off our woolly faux food series, a woolly full english breakfast and a woolly hotdog these go with the woolly hamburger we shot last year. It's been a great project to work on Jess' attention to detail making the food is fantastic and it's been great building the environments the food sits in.

A warm and woolly knitmas dinner

images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

I’ve recently been working with an amazing model maker and prop stylist, Jessica Dance. Her speciality at the moment is creating objects made of wool.

We’ve been working on a few woolly projects together and whilst shooting our ”Woolly mammals” series both of us mentioned that we wanted to create an image for Christmas.

I love shooting food and I always want people to do a double take with my images and spend some time working out what’s unusual about them. Over the past few years I’ve been creating faux food shots; taking classic food shots and recreating them out of everyday objects. This is where I came up with idea of using Jessica's fantastic wool craft to turn a traditional turkey Christmas dinner into a woolly feast.

I knew the food Jessica was going to produce would look great but it wasn’t until she brought them round the studio did I realise how beautiful they would be. Some of my favourite pieces are the pigs in blankets, with it's handmade bacon rashers, and the turkey itself with its perfectly designed drumstick. I wanted the photo, at first glance, to have the feel of a classic food shot, with it slowly revealing its true colours as you realise that something is not quite right. It was quite a challenge to light it and show off all the texture whilst keeping the warm and cosy feel of the wool.

Who’d have thought wool food could make you feel so hungry.

We Loved the final shot so much we decided to make it into a Christmas card to send out to friends and Clients. I wanted a unique greeting for the inside of the cards and came up with the line "Have a warm and woolly Christmas" Which was great, but I also wanted it to have a wool theme. So, I asked Maddy from Vue, who has been wowing me with her excellent typographic illustrations for a while now, to design a illustration for the inside. What she came up with was fantastic, and the card was ready to wing it's way to our friends and clients.

image © Madeline Macrae 2013 All rights reserved.

It's been a great project to work on and a chance to collaborate with some talented makers!

Hope you all have a warm and woolly Christmas and I look forward to sharing with you all of the new and exciting projects I have lined up in 2014!

Watch this space for more of mine and Jessica's woolly faux food.

Woolly Mammals

images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

Over the last year myself and model maker/stylist Jessica Dance have been working on a new collaboration and I'm super happy to now be able to share the results with you.

The project came about when we were having a brain storm over a coffee. I loved the Knit heads Jess had done and thought it would be great to build a bit of a story around some new animal heads she was making for our project. We came up with the idea of them all belonging to one person and having them in different rooms of this eccentric collector of woolly mammals house.

So over the next few months we sourced various props furniture and wallpaper and created these little slices into the life of this collector.

It was such a great project to work on and Jess was great fun to work with her amazing skills with the knitting machine are second to none. I love all the little touches she brings to the project, the knitted log is one of my favourites.

The moose head set was massive and took a day to build, the moose was a huge full size moose and was 7 foot from antler tip to antler tip, and stuck out from the wall about 4 foot!

Whilst shooting we came up with lot of knitty ideas so watch this space for some more woolly madness.

Party's over

images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

Recently I was asked by folks over at iGNANT to take part in their on going feature called two of a kind. They ask an Artist and a photographer to take part each time, they send them the same 3 random objects and ask them to create something from them. After looking at the previous entries and their lovely site I jumped at the chance.

So I waited for the package to arrive to find out what objects I would be having to use. When it finally arrived I opened the box (with some apprehension) to find a pair of rubber gloves a packet of party streamers and a set of wooden utensils.

Recently I have been working with the fantastic Jessica Dance while we were shooting another project I mentioned that I'd been asked to do this and asked if she would like to collaborate with me on this one too. She said yes and came up with a great way to use the objects using the wool technique that we've been developing on other projects for a while now.

The end result was the Wooly morning after the night before.

Apologies for a drought in blog posts It's been a busy few months shooting lots of personal work and commissions more to be revealed soon.

Drum roll please!

image © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

I was really pleased to be asked by Jessica Dance to collaborate with her on the fantastic paper drum for the 'drum roll' D&AD awards cover in this months Creative Review.

I've been working with Jess on a new personal series of work and it was great to work with her again on a commission look out for the new series to be shown soon.

image © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.