Back to digital...

I know I mentioned some time ago I decided to practice more water colours...and look, I'm right back where I started, digital stuff. More exactly - Adobe Illustrator and all the joy and happiness that comes along with it : )) 

In a way I think this piece was inspired by a recent discovery of Lichtenstein's painting "Cable", which went missing for about 42 years. 

This one is still work in progress, but I'm sure I'll keep you posted as soon as possible. 

Inspired ( clearly : )) by a film noir.

Thanks!

O.

Strange things happen

Ok, guys, this is something I've been working on for last two weeks. I have to say it's been delightful cooperation with a client, they were very helpful and we kept in touch for the whole time, discussing all the details and anything I was interested in, I just asked the question and got an answer immediately.  Unfortunately what originally was meant to be a cover for a photo book had been turned into T-shirt design. It's all about this guy, Kamil Holan, who won The Isle Of Man TT Newcomer's 2012. It's the first Czech guy ever who won this and it took some balls to do it, so thumbs up for this racer, it's a hell of a success.

And the T-shirt designs:

Page 11 & 12

The very last page 12 is the one when Benj's colour appears and again it is a little reminder of the other story and it's involvement with mine. As I said before it was great fun and brilliant experience as well as hard work. I think that for three weeks time for this comic we came up with something that wouldn't be done if we tried it individually and I guess we we're slightly overambitious, but I'm well happy with the result and would love to say: Huge thanks to Dave and Benj, for your help and keeping an atmosphere we had. I'll be more than happy to undertake this again, even if it means few more stressful weeks. Well done, boys!

Page 9 & 10

I slightly struggled with the way how to bring the bad guys, who ambush my main character's transport of alcohol, to the story. But in the end I decided not to confront them directly with my Italian mob, mainly for the purpose of saving the space I was running out of. But more importantly I realized there is no need for freneticly crazy shooting as this part of story was more about the moment of surprise and my main character being helpless to do anything about it.

Page 7 & 8

The 7th page is one of my favourite ones, I really enjoyed drawing it as I love these sceneries and the fact you don't have to necessarily draw every single detail of it to give a reader impression of what he's looking at.

page 5 & 6

Another element within our comic was significant colour for each story. As the whole comic is black and white, we decided to add one colour to individual story, and use both of them every time these stories cross over.  Dave's storyline had a link to red colour, mine was a colour of whisky or crates, and Benj's was yellow. When I came up with this idead of using colours I thought it might give a reader little hint of how it works as the whole.
I think it worked out quite well.

Page 3 & 4

Pages 1-4  are mostly about setting the story to give you the idea, where it takes a place and what's roughly going on. I was trying to avoid detailed description of what's going on ( text wise ) and let the imagery work for itself. But I still had to add a little bit more information, I personally found to keep this balance quite hard.

Page 1 & 2

So here's page 1 and 2. I decided to go for a midtone feeling of the comic, rather than my two coursemates, who got into inking and very contrast imagery. I guess it works really well, considering my story is the middle one and even though it's very different to theirs, its bounded to them mainly storywise and of course topic wise as well.

Chapter 2: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Well it's been a while since my last post, so I thought it would be a good idead to get back here and update my blog for a bit. The last project of year 2 Illustration was about collaboration with two friends of mine, Dave 'Hoops' Hooper and Benj Randell. We created a comic with 1930's gangster theme, each one of us brought 12 page story, and all these three cross over at certain points. It was a great fun and awesome experience, working on it together. So this is my chapter title page, which works as a main cover as well. I'll keep posting the whole story, if you're interested check Hoops' and Benj's blog, I'm sure they'll post their stories as well.

Character design from the 1st year's