Illustration Notes for Episode Eighteen
The relationship between this week’s episode and its illustration is self-evident—I hope. I did do some quick research to verify that buildings, streets and cars submerged in deep water can still have lights on. Other than that—it was a pretty straightforward task.
What I will talk about briefly here this week is the ‘sloppy, wiggly’ art style I’ve chosen for all these TWICE illustrations.
This has never been my normal ‘default’ style as an artist. Anyone familiar with my earlier work (which can be seen, if you wish to look, at www.markferrari.com) will know that my images have traditionally been VERY realistic and highly detailed, with extremely polished surface textures and light schemes. My original medium for many years was colored pencil—which I enjoyed for many reasons, not least of which was the extraordinary control of complex detail made possible by drawing and burnishing with rigid pencil points instead of larger, wiggly brushes. The problem with that style—even before I rode my mountain bike headfirst into that oncoming truck (see link above to my other website)—has always been that it’s very, VERY time consuming. It usually takes me weeks of time to complete a significant image in my ‘normal’ style. These lengthy completion times—in colored pencil, or even digitally—have always been problematic for some clients.
So, over the course of several more recent illustration jobs, I developed this other, very different illustration style to facilitate projects requiring LOTS of imagery in very short periods of time. TWICE is the epitome of such projects—requiring an illustration every week for several years—in addition to writing these episodes, and whatever other work I must do for actual income. I wanted to set up a visual format here that would make it possible to get SOMETHING out in a pinch, even with just part of a day at my disposal. This ‘new look’ allows me to literally ‘scribble’ something out in just a day or two. That’s right. Even these wiggly scribbles usually take me a day or two to produce. But if I really had to, I could probably turn out something that LOOKED consistent with the rest of these illustrations in just a few hours—as I will likely have to do from time to time before this serial is all finished. :]
There is a downside to having committed to this style. First, because ‘quick and sloppy’ is so NOT my default approach, it is actually MORE WORK sometimes for me to bend my reflexes in this direction. More often than you might guess, I actually end up ‘finishing’ an image that is too detailed and too polished to match the other images in this series, and then I must go back and spend MORE time ‘uglifying’ what I’ve done, so that it preserves the consistent look of this series. Hilarious, no?
Anyway—what a lot of words.
As always, find an uncropped version of this week’s image below:
