The Media gatekeepers over at FFWD were brazen enough to hire a yahoo such as myself to do the illustration for the cover, and the cover story. Titled "Mass Exodus", it was written by Julia Bevin and Anthea Black, the article discusses what is needed to build the Calgary Arts community, and the revolving door of artists who leave and return to Calgary once or more throughout their careers. Straight off the bat, I only had a rough description of the subject. I was asked to emphasize the themes of building, community, and people leaving. So I got to work Sketching, and sent them this:
You know, making it, I was thinking: Fuck yeah, they're building a giant red cow, but that guy is stealing bricks as he exodizes off to some other city. This is going to be the most awesome illustration ever! But no, the idea was rejected. The cow was too cheesy, the image was too busy, and it didn't quite fit with the story. In hindsight, they were right, and I was wrong. So I sent them a bunch more sketches, and they ultimatelysettled on this one:
So I cleaned it up a bit, and gave them the Rough draft:
They seemed happy with it, so I got busy with the Ball point pen, on a sheet of 11x17 bond paper, and whipped out this:
All coloured up, it came out like this. Fiddling with the colours ends up taking alot longer than you think it should.
I erased some of the bushes, lassooed the cloud and slid it over, and got this:
This is what it looks like, all said nd done, on newstands throughout Calgary:
And as an added bonus I threw in a drawing for the inside (beats me as to whether they ran it or not, I can't find it at the FFWD website):
Showing the breakdown of how a cover for Fast Forward comes to fruition is pretty damn cool. Good post!
ReplyDeletePS - I just saw the FFWD mag at work - your other picture made it to page 3, and also a much larger one on page 23.
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