Interview /// Concrete Playground meets webuyyourkids

The names Sonny Day and Biddy Maroney sound more like superheroes than commercial illustrators, but with their forces joined they become webuyyourkids. Kirstie Sequitin talks to Sonny ahead of their appearance at Semi-Permanent Brisbane.

Have you had any negative reactions to the name webuyyourkids?

Um, a few. If we had thought more about this before we started we probably would have called our selves something else. I think we get more raised eyebrows and "Sorry, did you say webuyyourkids? " than anything.

It's always funny calling up a company up and them asking where you are calling from.

What would you call yourselves otherwise?

"Fishfingers" could work?

How do you come up with concepts for each piece? In particular, the Best Coast print with the skateboarding legs coming out of the head of a cat and Washington's 'Clementine' video...

Good question, there's always an idea or something that comes to mind when we first start on an image. With Best Coast, we knew they loved cats so we started there. The skateboarding legs are female and that just seemed like a natural theme there. And we were just trying something new with composition. Most images come together quite naturally.

Clementine was just a simple graphic that popped into my head listening to the song and we just filled it out and built it up with references to the dead miner's daughter from the traditional Clementine song. I guess we're lucky it never feels like we have to go looking to hard for ideas or concepts - they usually just reveal themselves when you are considering the band / music / product / company you're working for and the brief you've been given.

Who or what's been inspiring you and Biddy lately and how does it come through in your work?

Loads of people, I think we are really into a lot of Japanese psychedelic stuff from the 60s and 70s at the moment and I think that's showing up in the work we are making. Tadanori Yokoo, Keiichi Tanaami are probably the most well known. Peter Max and other designers from the late 60s as well.

I think that we are trying to simplify the work that we make too - Enzo Mari is an Italian designer from the 50s Biddy recently stumbled across doing a Google and he's great. I think the influence of all these artists' colour palettes and their approach to simple shapes and strange compositions is very apparent in our work.

Your work is so multi-faceted, what's your favourite and least favourite medium or aspect of each medium to work with?

Sonny - I love drawing in pen and pencil - I only work in mediums I like so can't list any I don't.

Biddy - I do everything on the computer, so - Photoshop! Gig posters and animations are the most fun jobs we do.

You've got some pretty high-profile clients - Tourism Victoria, Qantas, St Jerome's Laneway Festival, amongst others - how did you catch your big break?

Many jobs have come through our agency the Jacky Winter Group - they are constantly working to bring their illustrators work. And the rest is through someone seeing and liking a job we've already done, or us having worked previously with that client before. For example Laneway Festival came to us after seeing our Popfrenzy posters. The Qantas job came to us as we'd worked with the designer previously when we did the Dungog Film Festival poster. We got the Dungog job because the client wanted a picture of a cow and they liked the cow/bull we drew in the Clementine video....

You'll be sharing your pearls of wisdom at Semi-Permanent next Friday, but can you share the one imperative piece of information that every creative should know before they start their career?

Do stuff for yourself, make work for yourself and try to have fun.

Don't stay up too late. Drink lots of water. That's about six things isn't it?

Finally, why is your Nine Lives exhibition called John Carpenter? I don't think I've even seen any of the Halloween movies...

It's called John Carpenter because we've made a series of work that are based on some of his classic movies from the 70s and 80s. I wanted to make some images in reaction to those films, and this seemed like a good time to do it.

Sonny and Biddy will be talking as part of the Semi-Permanent conference at the Brisbane Convention and Entertainment Centre this Friday.

Image credit: Les Savy Fav screen print (2011) by webuyyourkids