Happy New Year Everyone!
What better way to start off the year than to take a vacation! This year, I’ll be flying to Cambodia and Vietnam for a month so I won’t be accepting any new assignments until February 11th. I will however, try to check my email once a week.
To make up for my absence, I’m going to make this blog extra long! Starting with a new illustration I did for Orange Coast Magazine:
Orange Coast Magazine, Oppotunities to Serve
The illustration was for Orange Coast’s “Guide” department where they present multiple options for readers to fulfill New Year’s resolutions of “Giving Back” to the community. Here were my initial 2 concepts:
Unfortunately I didn’t take Orange County’s architectural landscape into consideration… I found out later that it was nothing like the city of Toronto… so I had to come up with something quick soon after I sent those to the AD. Here’s the sketch I came up; placed in the layout:
And here are two versions of the final.
Paste Magazine, R.E.M. circa 1982
This next assignment was for Paste Magazine. They wanted me to illustrate R.E.M. circa 1983 for their new music splash page (Reckoning) that introduces the reviews section of Paste.
I’m not so in tune with the western music culture so I had to do a lot of research for this one. It was especially difficult because there weren’t many photos referencing them back from 1983.. Thank god for youtube though. I went through a bunch of their old videos to get a feeling of their music. It’s always fun to lose yourself in the research and really get to know your subject inside out. By the end of this project, I felt I really became one of their fans. Anyhow, here were the initial sketches:
The AD went with the one with the floting letters. I played a bit more with it so that it worked with layout:
And then the final coloured illustration:
