The cover to the actual Issue (not my design, but a cool cover)
The only directive was “I need spooky stuff”. Contrary to recent activity i don’t have a ton of “spooky” images. Most are bright and cartoonish so I had to reach deep in my archives.
Here are the actual Spreads:
The illustration was originally a T-shirt design I was asked to make that never got produced.
There is a good story on this one, it was actually an old sketch I got to redo ( see below.)
They cropped my floating spooky dude for the final page. he was officially spooky
It has been a while since I have done magazine work so it was cool that I was offered the chance from a video game mag. My worlds are colliding!
Revisitng an old idea.
I like the idea of going back and redrawing an old image. I like to see how I have grown as an artist, and what better way than to cover familiar territory. However I try not to do this because you have to move forward, no sense in beating yourself over how you could have executed an idea better. With this new project though, I got the opportunity to go back and play this exercise out.
About two years ago I laid this idea down in my sketchbook and colored it in Photoshop:
I liked this idea, but I was just getting into coloring images digitally. Looking back it is really sloppy. The ghosts weren’t as well designed and the sillouettes of all of them could be stronger( too many details for a graphic piece). It was only really intended as a sketch for a more polished thing illustration. However time gets away form us and the idea was shelved.
Skip ahead ,Skip Ahead. When I was asked to submit “spooky” images to Game Dev. Mag I threw this one at them thinking I could finally polish it off. Game Dev Mag really liked it but had no time to give me to tighten it up. This whole assignment lasted 2 days and was a rush, which was why the were asking for existing work rather than seeking originals.
Well i couldn’t let this illustration out the door ( it being 2 years old and unfinished.)
Originally I asked for more time to do this and they said no (“Just send us the Hi-Res files we can work with it”). I figured I could push an email response by two hours and that might give me enough time to fix it ( with the mission impossible music blaring behind me). So I took it into photoshop and digitally recreated it in the span of 1.5 hours.
That’s right Mortimer an hour and a half.
I have gotten used to working fast, but this was madness ( in fact at the end of the process there was a big explosion i narrowly jumped away from). This was an anomaly project, making fast shouldn’t be a mark of it’s quality( that is just gimmicky.) To be honest this was sitting in my head for 2 years i just needed an excuse to strike. However I think it is a good example of working confidently and reactively, without getting hung up in the idea of a piece. I tend to be very in my head and overly process focused, so it was cool to have that striped away so I could just make something.
Funny how these things work out, I think this is one of my strongest pieces (and favored) to date and it happened in between emails.
till next time,
Vincent
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