Punk Rock Flyer

Going back to my roots as an illustrator with this piece and pulling out the pen and paper! It was around 6 hours work all-in-all to get this to a finished piece – which is maybe a bit longer than I should’ve spent on a quick flyer project! Anyway, the original illustration was the tough bit. I started sketching an angry face – something that sums up the ‘angsty’ sound of Left Alone.  However, after about 45 minutes of sketching it, I couldn’t help but notice that it’d evolved into more of  a “moronic” expression.

This was a piece of luck, really! It drove the rest of the design. I quickly drew a “robber” character stealing the guys mind and continued the sketch with the addition of “British bobby”  and “scumbag” characters – sketching the bobby with these long, confusing arms (something that is a common thread with my illustration pieces- I love drawing arms and other extremities that  “wiggle” around the page, interacting with other design elements.)

My illustration style is character driven. I don’t worry about the detail as much as getting the characters right. The four characters in this piece are definitely the main focus of my illustration; “cute but edgy” as one of my friends once described them as.

When the piece was fully inked with a combination of pen and sharpie (the tools I most like to use) I scanned the sketch and colored it  in Photoshop. I like to use a pastel Pantone shade palette in Photoshop and a dry brush to put the colors down. I wanted the illustration to remain “loose”, so I didn’t add a great deal of detail to the coloring, preferring to add minimal color details.

I added the text elements to design spaces that I had pre-planned  (leaving as black or white negative spaces) in my initial sketch. The final touch was to add a slightly “grungy” spotted texture to the background layer. I also turned the opacity down on my color layers so that this texture layer cut through the color and gave it this really cool “faded and slightly distressed” appearance.