Y'know, we really aren't a design studio or an ad agency or a media boutique or whatever it is that our families suggest we are when we tell them what we do. We are a group of people that love drawing. Though we aren't really fine artists, we still enjoy a good nude and sip wine at exhibitions and such like. All this makes us an art collective, but we prefer to be called an illustration studio.

Our setup is quite simple. Pencil Sauce is a proprietership company and we aim at remaining small, this allows us to remain cutting edge creative and flexible enough to make quick decisions. We are an eclectic mix of backgrounds with the only common thread being that all of us love to draw. Some of us have film school backgrounds, while others come from Art schools. We also have an information architect, an animator and a cat that comes in whenever it feels like stealing an artist's chair.

Another common thread that binds us is that we find advertising photography clinical, robotic and unsettling. The popular assumtion that photography humanises also forgets that people are imaginative. Illustrations are suggestive, fantastic and evoke far more mental modes than photography ever could. Illustration transcends geography, age and gender while photography only allows for clever hacks and workarounds to solve visual communication problems. We rant a lot about this over tea and wonder if we should actually hire an FMRI machine to show art directors why illustrations are better than photographs. But then again... it's tough telling art directors that our illustration don't include a free trip to Peru.

As for our tools, we are partial to pencils, though we are very good at software. We love opensource software tools and use Blender3d, Wings and Gsculpt for our 3d work, Inkscape and Xara Linux for vector and Gimp takes care of our digital work. We run our apps on Ubuntu, which you really ought to check out if you're tired of paying for virus ridden commercial operating systems.

Finally, just like our heros the famous Gauls, we too tie up the bard, enjoy a good laugh and take on some pretty hairy missions from time to time, though we always pull through spectacularly and thats why our clients love us.

~ Finis