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:

Some of the older stuff...

I used few of my older images and started to think what could I do with them. Not a rocket science, but still had fun with it. I started to consider a type face a part of my work, so here are some quick experiments I did today. Hope you like it. Thanks.

Little insight of the previous image...

 ..I thought it would be fun to create a little time lapse video of this image, so here it is: 

    Cupid - making of

Things don't always go according to a plan...

...so we have to find a way to deal with it. Therapy by work I call it. It was gardening, major deep cleaning of a house...just about anything to keep us busy not thinking about what lets us down so much. And of course drawing is a part of it. Sometimes words can't explain everything entirely, sometimes the more we talk the less sense it makes, so maybe the creative way is the right one. Anyway, here's my little contribution to relationships, to all the people in love as well as to everyone who's heart-broken. Thanks

And few close-ups

Sad news...

Sadly it is true. Last night a great actor, definitely underestimated by few, Michael Clarke Duncan passed away. His one of the first big films was Armageddon. Maybe a cheesy one, with all the american flags waving around, with a mission that needs to be done to save the world, with loads of cliche quotations ( you know what I mean: I love you forever, I need to do this, or somewhat like main character assuring his daughter:"Don't worry, I'll be alright..." As soon as he says it, you know he's pretty much fucked and there's no way back for him). ANyway, I don't want to write a review for this film, I like it anyway, I think it was cool back then. His other big role and I think many would say the BIG one, was The Green Mile. Who wouldn't remember the prisoner called Coffee. He performed brilliantly in this one, retarded Coffee, who can suck any disease out of people, and as we saw towards the end, he could also pass all the bad stuff in him to others. It was surely a great novel by Stephen King in the first place, but making a film out of it, they created a legend. Yes, it had great basis to be built on, but it was also a great choice of actors to be involved in and I dare to say that this film ( considering the prison theme ) can match with classics such as Shawshank Redemption. What fascinated me the most was the meeting of two worlds, two realities. The real world as we know it, and the fantasy one, the unbelieveable. You know sometimes you get films, where something entirely unreal happens, but characters kind of take it as it is and get on with it. So what, there's a Godzilla in the town, but we are more scared because of its size, rather to think, what the F just happened. In Green Mile, all the wardens just look so scared and so not believing what they just happened to see. As I said before - a great casting. Of course Michael starred in so many other films ( Sin City for example), TV series ( Spider-Man), or even did voiceovers for quite a few characters in video games, such as God of War II ( voice for titan Atlas ) or SOCOM II: US Navy Seals. Michael Clarke Duncan suffered from heart attack some time ago and unfortunately, even such a big man like himself, did not make it so he could stay with us. Rest In Peace, gentle Giant, you will be missed. I have done his portrait originally by pencil, then scanned in Photoshop, added textures and played around with layer mask and unrevealing the back by painting it black. Simple process, however I tried to keep the whole image simple, considering the situation.

London 2012

Little tests of London skyline, one of them purely digital, trying to keep the shapes as simple as possible, the other one drawn with pen and ink.

Little White Lies brief

It's been a long time since my little post but I'm trying to catch up with my regular job and creating some work as well - hard work it is though! :-) Anyway, at the moment I have few projects going on, some of them kind of done already, some of them is still work in progress. One of the ones I have done already was the competition for The Little White Lies magazine. The brief was to create an original cover for Little White Lies Magazine , depicting the main character of one of their five favourite films in 2011: Drive, Black Swan, Tree of Life, Super 8 or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Now they would let us to use our own imagination considering the background but choosing one of the main character was still the basics of the image. I decided to go for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, simply because I am a huge fan of Gary Oldman and I just loved the film. It felt like it's so different to what you get to see in cinemas nowadays and its atmosphere was like from a different decade.
I knew I was heading for simple style, nothing overcomplicated, too busy.
But what I had to work out first was the position of Gary Oldman's portrait - simply because of this random logo the Little White Lies magazine uses. Its a round logo in the middle of the page on top. I have to say it's not the easiest one to work with and I'm sure they are fully aware of that.
So I started with little thumbs drawn on Wacom tablet in Photoshop, mainly to save a time, I didn't want to spend too much time on trying to get Gary Oldman's likeness right, I rather just knew how the face is going to fit in.

Once I knew where to place this portrait without having it too interrupted by the annoying logo, I could carry on with simple linework. As I said before I wasn't going for some sort of digital painting or watercolours, as I wanted to keep it raw and simple.

This is what I started with: pencil drawing scanned in, adjusted levels so I could get nice white background and crisp fine lines. Later on I realized I needed to add few more blocks of colour separated by additional fine lines, just to make the effect of light coming on to the face work better. Following are colour versions I tried before I was happy with the result and also some playing around with layers was included.

The background was created by adding an Enigma Code, it helped as an initial ide, but through the further research I had to change that as the Enigma wasn't up to date with the era from the film was meant to be from. Colours were meant to be simle, quite limited range of them, yet I can't really explaint why I decided to choose these shades of blue and red. I tried various versions, some of them including the original black outlines, some of them without them. But as I said, that was only the work in progress from which I moved on towards the next versions.

After all ( and because of the tight deadline ) this was the final version. In the end I dropped the "blue" versions and came back to more life-like one. The feel of the colours was meant to be suited for the period of time the story was from, however somehow I managed to mess up RGB contra CMYK versions and when I submitted it it sort of turned out to be way too yellow-ish and rather a colour of poo. Oh well, I can only learn from my own mistakes and get better next time.

Location location location...

Design for the old graveyard based project - ink, water colour and photoshop

From rough design to screenprint final. Simple but yet working quite well, I think...

Character design from the 1st year's