INTERVIEW WITH THE COVER DESIGNER:

As you may have noticed, for the New Year we decided that one Le Cool cover per artist is just not enough. We always want more! So here’s Part Two of Aaron Brady’s interview to accompany this week’s (his second) cover – ‘The Wayside’.

We’ve been watching your showreel, lovely stuff – it’s been a good week for Irish animation but tell us a bit about your animation work?

Thank you..I need to update it soon with some newer work. I have a love/hate relationship with animation. I mean I love coming up with the ideas and giving the characters personality and emotions and watching the end product is wonderful and rewarding too. It’s just the stages in between that get me. The slaving over scenes, the sitting waiting for renders, the late nights, inevitable crashes of the software and imminent deadlines.

By the time I finish working on an animation I often feel I have become as artificial as the piece itself. It’s very draining mentally. Don’t get me wrong though, I definitely want to do it all again and I’m currently back in the ideas process but it’s like it’s something I have to prepare myself for, like running a marathon. Whether I like it or not, animation is just there in me, like a niggling little cute voice coaxing me back to the lands of make believe.

What have you been up to since last week?

I’ve been working on a few photography/art pieces that will eventually make up a series of works that I can exhibit and I was recently asked to take part in an exciting exhibition with For The Love Of…, so I’m looking forward to that. I’m also in the process of moving flats, so I’m concerning myself with the age-old flat moving issues like: ‘Can I take that plant?’ The plant was there before I moved in but I kept it alive so I think I’m entitled to it.

Are you working on a website?

Yeah. It’s happening. I took the big step and bought my own website last weekend but there’s nothing on it yet! I’m a bit lost about stitching the whole thing together so any art loving coders out there fancy helping me make a basic HTML site? I can draw you some pictures in exchange.

Here’s a wad of cash and a free day in Dublin, what do you do?

I would probably say ‘Thank you very much. Are you sure? This is a lot of money.’ And you might say something like ‘Yeah, just take it man.’ And I would just take it and I would immediately go and buy a few bejeweled onesies in Brown Thomas – just because I could. Then, at some point while on Grafton Street I would inevitably find myself in HMV walking around the shop aimlessly, like I normally do, and coming out 15 minutes later without buying a thing.

After that I’d just head home in a taxi, ‘cos I’m flush. I’d order in something delicious and play Super Mario coin battles with a few friends – who would have been doing nothing anyway apart from checking out Facebook all day. We’d all sip some beverages and sit there cosy in our bling onesies like regal Teletubbies. I’d save the rest of the wad for the weekend.