KENNETH ANDERSON

illustrator and character designer

There's something instantly gripping when you see the works of illustrator and character designer Kenneth Anderson. An expressive and immediate connection, a curiosity and want to know more. He has collaborated with Nick Jr, Dreamworks TV, BBC CeeBeeBies, Imagine FX, Axis Animation, Disney Interactive and Trickstar Games among others.

Kenneth Anderson is a professional illustrator and character designer based in the United Kingdom with 15 years experience working between games, animation and illustration. His specialties are story driven and character based illustration and character design for a variety of mediums, in particular children’s television development. Kenneth has a background in traditional 2D animation having worked on Sylvain Chomet’s Oscar nominated film The Illusionist (2010) as an in-betweener followed by animating on the French feature, Titeuf: Le film (2011).

In 2009 he started his own company Character Cube with the aim of becoming a freelance character designer and illustrator. Since then he has worked with numerous companies around the world such as Nick Jr, Seasame Workshop, BBC Ceebeebies, Brown Bag Films, ImagineFX and others on a wide variety of projects.

When talking about inspiration, he mentions Nico Marlet, Peter De Seve and Carter Goodrich. “I like the fact that they all have an illustration background, they bring a unique vision to the world of animation. I also wish I could draw like them. In addition, I like the work of Johnny Duddle, Ian McQue, Drew Struzan and LD Austin but also old time illustrators and artists such as LC Leyendecker, John Singer Sargent, Monet and Alphonse Mucha. All these artists differ greatly in style and what they do – I think it’s good to take influences from different areas of the art world.”

Discussing his work process, Kenneth says: “Some characters are just born out of a spontaneous doodle, others are a bit more thought out and maybe relate to a story idea I have. A lot of the time I am just drawing for practice and now and then something pops out which I genuinely like, at least for my personal work. Also, I’m sometimes inspired by the books or films I’m watching at the time or maybe an emotional state.
I also get some ideas from travelling – I love to take off somewhere and explore and along the way I usually meet a whole host of wonderful and unusual people. No doubt they are all lurking in my sub conscious still, waiting to be drawn!”

Currently he divides his time mostly between TV animation design and illustration gigs while trying to find time to develop his own personal projects!

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