If you’re a fan of music, cosmic raves, and mud slide nudity, then no doubt you’ve been mortgaging your kidneys to get tickets to this year’s Meredith Music Festival. With two ballots down already, some of you may have been successful, others (such as myself) may be looking forward to a night on the streets in a crusty sleeping bag to procure a ticket, but for all of you this site will have been clogging up your cache since the whole hoo-ha begun. Click through and you’ll most certainly be dazzled by a certain Mr. Habicht’s trademark cut paper collage plastered all over the front page. When the MMF came to us requiring an artists to produce a complete illustration suite for the event we knew that Clemens would be able to do it justice, with his vibrant parrot amalgamations spanning everything from sleeping and moshing to dancing and getting nude. Look out for the continuation of this theme when festival time rolls around, that is if you remember inbetween all that sleeping, moshing, dancing and getting nude.

You’ve been experiencing a little radio silence on our end, but it’s not without good cause. The Jacky Winter Group (along with all our other friends in the Compound Interest) has just completed a colossal HQ move from our tiny cardboard enclosed quarters to a spacious Collingwood warehouse complete with chill-out geodesic domes and baseball driving range. We would love to have a chinwag with you at Lamington Drive’s re-opening exhibition tonight. Health Food of a Nation is the first ever solo show from JW’s caricature king Eamo Donnelly. Get down here before Matt eats all the homemade lamingtons.

Readers Digest needed a playful visual wingman when it came to illustrating a humorous story about the origins of popular sayings. Steve Scott’s vivid psychedelic victoriana was the perfect fit. Even without seeing the words he manages to get us giggling about his interpretations of a backseat driver, being in the doghouse, and a Monty Python-esque nudge, nudge, wink, wink scene.

Most alumni publications are dominated by awful camera phone quality photos of alums from unflattering under-chin angles. The Melbourne University Alumni Magazine wanted something different, and came to us looking for someone to illustrate a group portrait for their Class Notes section. Guy Shield’s flair for semi-literal pen and ink was perfectly suited to creating a group likeness, as you can see above.

When the Melbourne University Alumni Magazine needed someone to illustrate a feature about graduates working on development projects around the world, they turned to one of their page-turning regulars. Sonia Kretschmar applied her painterly hand to the task and created this multi-faceted organic fractal plant, demonstrating different aspects of development in earthy greens and browns. You can read the whole article here.

Toby and Pete again! We are constantly blown away by these guys. They’ve just finished illustrating this Oscars style trophy campaign for Fruche.

Whether you have an unstoppable urge to find out about being an art rep or you just want to hear the dulcet tones of Matthew Shannon’s professional speaking voice, tune in here for episode 44 of the Escape from Illustration Island podcast featuring an audio interview with our dashing General Manager. This was recorded at last month’s ICON6 Ilustration Conference, where Matt was flying the JW flag and giving punters an exclusive first look at the Jacky Winter Group’s exciting new portfolio app for artists and directors, Slipcase.

When it comes to 3D illustration, nobody does a more incredible and impeccable job than Toby and Pete. They recently worked their magic over these bulging knitted words for Kellogg’s new look All Bran.

Ben Sanders has just lived out a lifelong dream to illustrate the cover of Desktop magazine. Not only is his hand-drawn textural retro styling plastered all over the front of the August issue, he also gets a meaty interview inside quizzing him about his work and career longevity. Read an excerpt of the article here, but get your mitts on a hard copy to read the whole thing.

As a prolific artist, musician, and film director, Jeremy Dower has been on our radar for some time. His dexterity in both digital and hand-rendered painting had us really listening, and we are delighted to finally welcome him to the Jacky Winter nest. Jeremy’s first paid work was in the meticulous realm of pixel art for gaming, a field requiring both a patient, steady hand and a knack for embedding cute characters with human emotions. He is now a master of character design, playing with the uncanny to create malformed astro critters with a glossy, three-dimensional nature that makes them come to life.

Rob Poulton is one our traditional illustration brains who nests in The Bowery. Among many other talents, he has impeccable insight at the conceptual stage of a project and knows how to make ideas into concrete visuals. So when John West came to us needing someone to conceive a grizzly bear holding a can of tuna (that would eventually be transformed into a life-size inflatable bear), then Rob was the obvious choice.

Unfortunately we don’t have any photos of the blow-up bear in situ, but we can tell you it looked a little bit like this bear and less like this bear.

Kate Nash is a sultry flame-haired singer from the mother country who spawns indie pop hits with some kind of amazing mutant force. webuyyourkids are our resident unflappables who can apply their off-kilter bananas brains to just about anything that comes their way.

Kate Nash needed a poster for her Australian tour (happening right now). WBYK spear-tackled it in the groin with this expertly illustrated bill. Gig posters are where WBYK started out and so, naturally, they are a dab hand.

The Hatch artist Lilly Piri uses an assortment of pencils, oils and acrylics, applying them gently to paper to create floaty marshmallow scenes in pastel pink and yellow shades. Her work is as girly as it is sweet and often adorns the pages of publications and projects that are also girly and sweet.

Most recently, she has adorned not one, but six pages of Brazilian teen magazine Capricho. Each spread is in her trademark hues and unfolds a particular story. Lilly is your lady for more lovely things like this.

Andrea Innocent’s Japanese manga-esque digital handiwork is consistently colourful, playful and wonderfully bizarre. This made her a stand-out choice for Libra Youth when it came to illustrating their latest campaign directed towards young girls. They commissioned 22 static frames of illustration that were then animated by Empire Marketing. The resulting animations appeared on Facebook and the Libra Hearts web banners published in June this year.

Much like our illustrators, smart animals use all their senses. Beci Orpin used all of hers and dazzled the readers of Readers Digest with this illustration about animal instincts.

So we’ve crossed off over half of these calendar pages already, but we wouldn’t let the year slip away from us before we let you know that it was Jacky Winter’s Amanda Upton who penned the blooms for each month. This was a freebie with Notebook magazine in January.

The Bowery artist Martin Abel recently teamed up with the 4WD of socks, the Holeproof explorer, to draft these black and white, suitably manly, rugged explorer visualisations for internal distribution.

JW’s James Gulliver Hancock recently conjured up these home brewing illustrations for the Sunday Telegraph. The first one was to the client’s brief – executed with his signature charm and humour – and then he threw in three more tongue-in-cheek bottled brews he drew just for kicks.

The UN International AIDS Conference took place last week in Vienna. When not attending symposia and plenaries and bridging sessions, delegates weren’t left wondering what to do in their spare time – thanks to this spectacularly illustrated ‘When in Wien’ guide featuring Lachlan’s Conn’s modernist cartoons of ring trams and Wiener kaffees. It forms part of the UNAIDS Outlook 2010 report launched in the lead-up to the conference.

One of Caitlin Shearer’s immaculate rosy-cheeked and big-eyebrowed ladies was the perfect model for this spread on how to trade online, out now in the August issue of Notebook magazine. She’s sitting pretty at the kitchen table in her high-waisted jeans and frilly blouse showing you don’t have to be Wall Street fat cat in a bowler hat to make a few bones on the stock market.