My two favorite published jobs of the year (thus far!) happened to come to me at the same time, the first being the E.T busking illo as seen in the last post, and my other fave commission is this Johnny Depp illo for the world's number one film mag Empire.
When the Art Ed at the mag Adam sent over the brief I was thrilled, as this is the kind of image i'd draw as a personal piece anyways, so one of those rare dream jobs I get but once or twice a year, felt kind of like the stars aligned for this one.
Brief was simple enough: Draw a Johnny Depp cut out figure, with all manner of weird and wonderful costumery from some of Johnny's movie back catalogue created to fit said figure.
So got to work pretty quick smart... well not as quick as i'd have liked as I was busy on other jobs (E.T and others) but as soon as the time became available I was straight on this.
At the bottom is the grey scale rough, this you'll see is a more finished rough than I sometimes muster.
The middle illo, is how I sent it to Adam, I gave him a layered version, so he could move things where necessary to fit his layout.
At the top is how the illo looked in print, complete with a wild west paper texture to bring the whole layout together, which I think was a lovely accompaniment provided by Adam and really sets things off on the the printed page.
Click on the illos, to see in more detail.... if nothing else that is probably the finest fur coat i've ever drawn!
This drawing can be seen in the current copy of Empire which is on the newsstands now!
I've been saying for a while that an epic personal piece will be coming to this blog soon, but i've been super busy with my regular magazine jobs that it's difficult to fit in my own work... the reality is I've only been showing a relatively small portion of everything that is published on this blog for the past few months, because i've been drawing a lot of stuff! What I can say is, that i'm about 90% there with one of my epic personal images, which is just one of a series and that i'll be attempting to post it here in the next few weeks... I can't say anymore than that, it's top secret! But a warning: People's eyes may explode upon seeing it... particularly if you are an 80's geek like myself... Whoops, said too much!
