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BACK AT IT
A few months ago my friend Dan Cohen asked me to do some illustration work for his band Stop Drop (formerly Stop Drop N Skank*). I’ve been out of the game for a while, but it was nice to be drawing again. It was also a reminder to why I moved away from illustration in the first place. Regardless it was really fun, and I’m quite happy with the result. What they wanted was a boat lost at sea about to be overtaken by a huge wave. This was to be the album artwork for their new LP “A Wake//At Sea”. Dan and I met for lunch and we hammered out the details. Then I got to drawing and here’s what I came up with.
So I do all my illustration digitally, and I try to stick to vectors for as long as possible, but usually end up doing the colouring in a nice high-rez bitmap. For this project, however, I managed to stay entirely in vector format from start to finish. First thing I did was some really rough sketches of the basic shapes and lines I would be working with. These type of drawings really help me as guides for the whole drawing process:
Then I got some references and attacked the boat. I got the lines done and eventually some simple inking. I started with a basic line drawing, and then started to play with heavy inky strokes and tapers. When zoomed in closer it looks like an ink drawing. Dan and I both love comics, so I knew he’d be on board:
The water was tricky (as anyone who has ever tried to draw water can tell you). I wanted really choppy waves, and lots of spray. My first attempt left much to be desired:
Then to this, which didn’t have the gritty splashy feel I wanted:
I revised my technique a bit and came up with this, I think the higher detail of the waves and spray really helps, I’m also glad I went with the more vertical wave here:
The final layout for the CD and T-shirts was done by the band. I gave them all my drawings and they did the print layout for the CD and the sleeve. The final vectors I sent over looked like this:
Here is the final Illustration where the cover and CD art were taken from. It’s all full vector so the designer had a lot of latitude for cropping and sizing. I’m pretty happy with the decisions they made in the end, although if I’d known they were going to zoom way in for the sleeve art I would have done a much more detailed spray:
So that’s pretty much the skinny. It was a quick project, and like I said it was fun to be illustrating again. My next post will probably have some details on the project I did for Nuit Blanche.
*Skank, for those of you who don’t know is how ska kids dance. See the wikipedia entry