Little Large Tokyo

Just finished up this illi for an editorial piece covering sushi’s popularity around the globe. The brief was quite narrow in the beginning and initially I was going and asked to drop something quite mainstream and flat down for the editorial. I drew down some pretty average ideas of basically just sushi in mass on a globe as the art director first suggested.

It felt way too boring for what could be such a great job, so i went back to the drawing board and threw down the below idea of a sushi-train kinda style busy Tokyo street scape with different sushi’s to relate to different sections throughout the editorial.

As you can see it looks quite wild but at this point of all my ideas were quite on target with the editorial and brief which was good. My ideas behind the sushi pieces about which relate to the article are from the top: The avocado racer plane and train which covers the “sushi on the go/food on the go”, The Sushi roll with whale tale covers “sushi in the marketplace, local produce”, The middle carriage style sushi is a mix of “sushi as an export/marketplace product”, The bow tie is “sushi as a gift”, The hot dog being “sushi within western cultures”, The tongue with flag is “sushi’s origins” and the bottom two are “sushi on the go” and “sushi to the upper class/posh” which is the cool guy sunbathing within his sushi roll. All of this which are spoken of as key points within the editorial.

Here is my good linework:

This final linework is quite different from my revised versions leading up to it. The main difference is the spacing and busyness to it overall which I thought was necessary to pull it off.

Some photoshop, charcoal and acrylic and it ends up like this: (click to enlarge)

The bottom cut out section is for part of the title of the editorial. Also I was not trying to attempt an isometric or anything similar and the natural progression to its quite structured composition was a pretty new approach to me (considering I love and feel stronger working on floating compositions).

That’s all for now, some more cool stuff coming soon

A