Aad Goudappel
Aad Goudappel

Autism

Research and Knowledge Communication Professional

Commissioned by AJ Cohen at BetterMed.

Aad Goudappel has been working as a freelance illustrator for over fifteen years. He is currently based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. He graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and in addition followed courses at the Art Institute of Boston and the Camberwell College of Art in London.

About Entry
This illustration was done for BetterMed to accompany an article discussing autism as the next step in evolution and how studying the autistic brain might also help us to unlock the mysteries of the human brain in general.

Website/Online Portfolio
aadgoudappel.com

Brief
The brief was simply the article I had to illustrate, no other input.

Materials
Pencil, Paper, Tracing paper, Scanner, Wacom, Mac, Caffeine, Adobe illustrator. Final result was entirely digital.

Research
Glancing at some old keys and keltic knots, to ensure what I was doing wasn't to far off.

Process
The process was fairly easy as I was given free reign. The client didn’t want to see roughs at all but simply asked me to do what I thought would work. So as with any assignments I started scribbling ideas while reading the article. After I decided what I wanted to do I made some thumbnails to see how I wanted to do it. And proceeded to final.

Resistances
Just the ever present self doubt and self critique.

Insight
Always listen to your spouse. If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t have entered this piece into the competition.

Distractions
Doing a few online Autism Spectrum Quotient tests. Won’t share the results here…

Numbers
1.000.000. A million thanks to A.J. Cohen from BetterMed for trusting me with this assignment.

Afterwords
Images was the very first illustration annual I ever bought, being awarded a WIA as it is called now is very special for me. By the way I once had a blind date with a girl called Wia, was a total miss-match.

 

Portrait by John Vane







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