Illustrator and animator Dan Woodger admits he struggles to describe his work. “I guess you could say it’s quite cartoon-like,” he remarked once in an interview with Medium. Indeed, scrolling through his work, Woodger’s love of cartoons is evident. His characters, portrayed going about their daily lives, often sport a huge smile on their faces. “I like to give my characters expressive faces and enjoy using humour in my illustrations,” he explains, “but the execution is quite neat, I like to use clean, tidy lines and symmetry, so in some ways I feels more a designer at times. It fits somewhere in between I think.”
According to Woodger, his love of cartoons can be traced back to his childhood, when he enjoyed watching The Simpsons and daydreaming about making a living from doing what he loves—drawing and animating. “I’ve always loved drawing, but for a long time I just considered it a hobby and assumed you couldn’t make a living off it,” he admits, “so I focused my attention elsewhere.”
It wasn’t until he was coming to the end of his A-Levels that he found out his college offered an Art Foundation course. The option to study the foundation of art hasn’t occurred to him up until then. “A free extra year of education doing just art and design, or into full time employment at the Golf Club I was working at? Seemed like a no-brainer so I enrolled and I’ve never looked back,” he recalled.
His spontaneous enrollment seems to have paid off – big time. Now a freelance illustrator, animator, and icon designer, his clients are as big as Google, The New York Times, GQ, and The Washington Post. Recent works include an animation to The Handwash Song and an animated loop of the new Vauxhall Corsa-E.
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