Footballing Heroes

This project developed about a month ago. I was invited to contribute to the Footballing Heroes project, now in its third incarnation: http://www.footballheroes.org/

I don't often get to do portraits, so this was a really fun, challenging project to undertake. I started in usual way by doodling in a sketch book and copying photographic reference, but expanded this once the likeness was more or less there. I used both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to build these two images, starting out by blocking in colours in Illustrator and then by adding paint (scanned and digital) in Photoshop. I ended up playing with different versions of each character, mainly tonal changes, but enough to make a noticeable if subtle difference.

Images of the printed versions will follow in due course.

Diego Maradonna

Ademir Menezes...

Introduction...

Hello! This is the first entry into my shiny new blog. I work as an illustrator, based in the North West of the UK and I'm planning on using this blog space as an extension of my own web site. Expanding on some of the illustration work in detail, showing sketches, layouts, experiments, some golden oldies perhaps and of course the inevitable cock ups that go hand in hand with the creative process. I guess the first thing to do is publish a couple of photo's of my studio and some of the kit therein...