From the art director's lips (or rather, the email): "This story is simply about the great debt our nation is in. I think we want to depict the “gruesome” aspect of this topic, and really drive home the point that our debt is ruinous. Your style struck a chord with me because you’ve done several pieces that are sort of dramatic in manner, but can deliver the message in a palpable way. I’ve attached a cover template so you can also get an idea of where things fall in placement. I’d like to get 3-5 different sketches, and then we’ll choose one for cover, one for inside."
In order to milk this assignment for two blog posts, I will post some of the sketches and the interior illustration today; then I will post the rest of the sketches and the cover art next month :)
I had a pretty confident idea that a certain sketch (not shown) would be chosen for the cover, so I explored a wide variety of subject matter for the other concepts. The first 3 of the 6 sketches:
Lady Liberty drowning in red ink (a quote from the article) explored in two sketches:
And a bank picked clean:
In the end, the art director went with the torch as the interior image:
Read the article here.
Enjoy the Day,
Chris
Thank you for sharing Chris. Always happy to see your fleshed out value studies and the overall detail to your sketches. I think your graphic style provides you with a great opportunity to do the graphic design/layout yourself when hired for jobs. While I think that the typography above works extremely well with the image and that you do have have quite a few 'type and image' samples on your website, you should be pushing the combination of the two which would eventually lead to even more flexibility in the composition as well as more consistency between your images and the text. try to additionally shoot some text layout with your sketches or the finals from now on. You'd be surprised how many art directors will eventually allow you to take over that part as well regardless of their "standard" design requirements that they would traditionally go with.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'd like to see some more magic behind your process sometimes in the future if you would be willing to share. Like all the little steps when you are working in photoshop and so forth. Hoe your layers are set up, what kind og brushes you use. The color variations you go through as you are working. Anything that can show the work flow. Taking image screen caps would be sufficient.
It would be really nice to see those little steps since I want this educational blog to also focus on the little things that majority of the step by step process pieces tend to let out! :)
thanks buddy....glad to see you are staying busy!
-Tin