Jack Teagle gives Green Man 2026 a sentient landscape identity where plants play music

Green Man's 2026 identity came out of a familiar pattern in illustrator Jack Teagle's practice: clients are drawn to his personal work first. After a trial illustration, Many Hands Studios gave him the full festival brief along with a moodboard made "almost entirely" of his own projects, and Teagle took it because the client wanted him for himself.

In the early sketches Teagle drew the real world too literally, so he pushed toward an offbeat visual language: the Brecon Beacons setting stopped being scenery and became a living character. Plants grew human sensory organs — ears, eyes, mouths — and some plants became organic instruments, building an ecosystem where everything plays off everything else.

He approached the identity as a holistic visual system rather than standalone pictures, chopping and changing jigsaw pieces across programmes, cups, T-shirts and the site. A shared palette and large sheets of hand-drawn texture kept the dense artwork cohesive, and his deliberately physical process — scanning, printing, pencilling over layouts, then digital inking and colouring — let elements be reused at a consistent line weight.

Thousands of festival goers wore the T-shirts, carried the cups and programmes, and saw the illustrations animated on stages, which Teagle calls a fantastic way to show what he can do. The project also fed back into his practice: it broadened his visual language and, after a dry spell, clients are again commissioning work that is weird, original and unmistakably his.