Richmond Places...A Series

Lately, I've been working on a series based on places in Richmond I hold near and dear to my heart. Since I won't be living here for too much longer, it would be good for me to do a tribute to the city...plus I'm getting practice with working on environments.

(click to see the colors in better quality!)

This spot is one of my favorite places to sit at a little coffee shop called Crossroads. It's one of the first places I fell in love with since attending VCU. As many coffee shops as there are in Richmond, like any first love, you can't help but always go back to it. When the weather's perfect (like it has been lately), I like to sit outside with a tasty scone and a delicious spiced chai smoothie. It's also an ideal spot for people-watching, since there's always a variety of folk who come and go to this place.

The only issue I've been nitpicking about with this is the lighting on the leg...I'll need to go back there to take some more reference shots (they make a huge difference in making your work look ten times better!).

Thought Process, Continued

After completing the thumbnails for the Strokes illustration (see previous post), I realized that the majority of them were only of the band or Julian Casablancas posing. Yes, a straightforward idea that had the potential to be illustrated well, but most likely not stick with the viewer. I want to avoid someone looking at it, saying, "oh, nice picture" then moving on to something else. I'd rather stop someone in their tracks to think further about the image they see, even if they interpret something different from what I had imagined.

(materials: pencil and charcoal)

I decided to go with the thumbnail of Julian Casablancas with the Rubik's cube. Sounds strange, but it was the string of ideas I had that lead me to this thought. The album is an interesting blend of their consistent "rock" sound with a twist of eighties pop. The songs vary in the ratio of those sounds, but that's what I generally perceived from the album and the Rolling Stones review. The idea of illustrating the combination of opposite sounds was a challenge I wanted to take on. I did so by emphasizing the "rocker" look of Julian Casablancas (in my opinion, an image that fans of the band are aware of) and the Rubik's cube, a famous puzzle popular in the eighties. I thought it would be interesting to represent the Rubik's cube as a puzzle Casablancas tries to solve in this album; the problem being re-imaging the band without losing their loyal fanbase.

Drawings and Thought Process

(I apologize in advance if the photos aren't too good quality! A busted graphics card in my laptop leaves me to use school computers and scanners, which is never fun.)

Below: Steve Aoki, people in the library, and another character sheet.

 Below is my drafting for an editorial illustration. The article was about the Strokes new album, Angles, taken from Rolling Stone magazine. The most important thing about going from article to illustration is taking note of key words from the article. This should help narrow down the main theme of the illustration (writing down these thoughts and ideas are important when wanting your illustration to communicate the article's message!). I'm a huge fan of this album, so getting into the material and understanding it was no problem for me. The last thing I wanted to do was to simply draw/paint the band members. So here, I wanted to focus on how the album experiments with a pop/electronic sound while still maintaining their signature rock sound. In my next update, you'll see where these thoughts and ideas will lead to...