Sam x FCB NY: Smokey Bear 80th anniversary.

This long-ranging project saw Sam Gilbey partner up with FCB New York to paint fire safety icon Smokey Bear through the eyes of decades of American culture. We hear from Sam himself about how the whole thing came together.

I was honoured to be invited by FCB New York and CIA to paint the American icon Smokey Bear, for an outdoor campaign (fittingly enough) celebrating his 80th year of helping Americans to prevent forest fires.

Across three posters, each representing a different decade (namely the 50s, 70s and 80s), I was tasked with illustrating a version of Smokey inspired by his recent ‘live action’ incarnation in a television campaign, with each poster emphasising a different aspect of fire safety and including families and friends enjoying the great outdoors.

I’ve created a number of paintings over the years that lean into a particular era or genre of painting, whilst retaining my own style, and this is something that FCB were keen to incorporate, so that the set of ads both came from the same hand, but also felt appropriate for each decade. As such, the 50s poster has more of an oil painted feel, the 70s has a lighter/brighter gouache and acrylic approach and the 80s takes a nod from collage style movie posters of the decade with some glowing airbrush work included. Then, by combining this with three different palettes as dictated by different times of day and night, and three different groups of people in different situations, with clothing and accessories helping to establish the time period represented, it ends up hopefully showing a broad range of the beauty of national parks and highlighting that humans being responsible in these settings has been, and remains absolutely essential, so that Smokey’s presence/advice is felt, but ultimately it’s up to us.

The project took about five months from start to finish, with planning and concepting for the first two months, and the main artwork taking approximately a month each. I worked on some of the largest (digital) canvases I’ve ever created at around 80” wide, in order to accommodate the fact that the artwork would be used from incredibly narrow and tall to a cinematically wide landscape.

Whilst FCB designed the type, with each decade I embellished it by hand and added additional detail and era-appropriate effects.

It was a very intense project at times, but everyone at FCB was great to work with, and it really felt like a true collaboration between us all. Yes they had entrusted me with the responsibility of making all the artwork, but we communicated regularly via email and video, and it was very rewarding to see it all coming together. They also helped in a very direct way by effectively ‘casting’ the characters in each poster, and having impromptu photoshoots in their offices, which were invaluable in terms of helping to give each poster the natural warmth between humans that they needed.

See more epic Sam creations here. 

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