Here is a recent illustration I did for OUT about an interesting new book called ‘Single Man’. Nick Vogelson who was art directing the job was interested in doing something similar the small personal book I made here. This approach was perfect for the article and feel of the book itself which revolved around a mans struggle with his art due to the complexity of life and relationships.

After reading the editorial I settled on a good scene which Nick originally suggested of an older man with one of his students skinny dipping nude after a drunken encounter.
I did a quick sketch and just went straight into painting it with no real colour preference. I actually painted it in a near opposite palette to that of the final and achieved the final colours by using photoshops channels and colour controls. Also I ‘filled out’ alot of the paint to get it a little more stronger.

(Click to enlarge)

Also it’s always a treat to be given the spread with all the bits and pieces in place. Nick supplied this before even starting a sketch which made the composition/layout of the illustration a smoother process.

On a side note, wow its great to use paints again. Over the last few months I haven’t had to many opportunities to paint even in small scale with the jobs at hand and it was extremely refreshing/inspiring.

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

Twenty days later and I make a post… my blogging skills are not so superior!
Heres a quick spot I did late this week about the writer of the column having a beer in a swanky new york club/bar in his scruffy/old clothing compared to the fashion conscious locals who sip their cocktails.

Basically old generation vs new, elegance vs grunge etc.

Heres my linework:

This was my first and only idea, I wanted to step away from the rather flat compositions I have done for previous illustrations on the column.

Below is a quick mock of how the lighting would be and how easily I could over render this which I had to take into consideration with such a tight deadline. I didn’t want to get too confused with two lights multiple people and glass everywhere. Also I tried to think about the closer bottles behind the bar and background at this point to make sure they didn’t overpower the people or main guy.

With all this in mind and the deadline approaching I went for quite a simple palette. I left the outer people quite plain and let the glass if anything speak for the “elegant/swanky” side of things. I then lightly rendered the main guys body very quickly just to pop him out a bit from it all.

Heres my final (click to enlarge):

Some may notice its not as washed out or paint heavy as my other work, this was mainly due to the deadline and as funny as it sounds it was nice to get on the computer for some work after drawing/painting for the majority of the week.

That’s all for now but some cool stuff coming and I’m going to try posting some of my personal work (as little as it is with the commercial world dominating me).

A

Here’s a couple of small jobs I’ve recently completed in between some larger jobs I’ll be posting within the next couple of weeks.

First up a quick job for New Fancy Band, a bFM thing going on later this month. Originally this was a rough I did for this years NZ Music Month but was denied as seen in my earlier post here.

This was completed in quite a rush, and from the original idea is not quite how I would of liked to have completed the idea but due to time and budgets this was the result. It did turn out ok for the time though and still holds a certain value of fun/uniqueness which is always pleasing.

Nothing changed too much from the original sketch besides refining the characters quickly and changing to mice to playing drums on a tree stump. Though I was quite disappointed with this final on-screen I think it will pull through a little stronger in print.

Next up a quick editorial I did about an author reading a passage from his new book about someone who has developed Tourette’s Syndrome. As you can see the illustration had quite a lot going on and had to have evidence that it was in a bookstore reading to an audience who was shocked/surprised about the swearing (which is infact passages from the actual book).

Here’s my initial rough on paper:

And below a few revised sketches along, the near final linework:

Moving onto the final I had to make some changes to the speech bubble positioning,shape and position of the wording inside the bubbles. With so much necessary content the balance of it all and the strength of the author was key to making the composition not get too lost. Originally I had the bubbles in black with white text, which proved to be too overpowering. The suggestion of white bubbles was mentioned by the art director Salman Naqvi of Q, and helped it out alot!

Below is my final:

A