Punt Cover Step-by-Step

IGI member Matthew Griffin delight us with an amazingly detailed step-by-step on a fantastic project.

This is the type of brief I absolutely love. The client, in this case Emma from Punt magazine, gives you a theme and then says ‘do anything you like.’ No holds barred, no restrictions, just let the imagination go – If only every project was like this…

The theme I was given was simply ‘Discovery’. So here’s how I went about making the cover.

First of all, I need caffeine and music. So strong coffee and iTunes are step 1.

Then I think for a bit. I have another 12 teas and coffees. I go to the loo a lot. I let the word sink in and see what kind of image pops into my head. There are lots of avenues you could go down – science, microscopes, lost tribes. Countless possibilities. For me though, it was Space. I love Space stuff. Those pictures of the surface of Mars and Titan blow my mind. Plus, there’s been a lot of news recently about manned missions to Mars and the future of humans in space. So to me, the most fun thing I can think to draw in the theme of ‘Discovery’ is something to do with space exploration. Pretty soon, I see pretty much the final product in my minds-eye and I hit the notebook to begin the process of making it happen.

As I mentioned, I tend to see the final product straight away, and the rest is a process of making that idea a reality on the screen (maybe we all do that, I don’t know). I had thought about discovering tribes at one stage, and a lot of my work features strange ‘flourishes’ which I like to make into leaves. So the jungle theme won’t be abandoned altogether. I decide I want some astronauts exploring a new planet. The planet will have dense plant life, adding to sense that there might be life there, and therefore, I think, a slight tension. I get the rough layout of what I’m thinking about down in the notebook.

I start to think about my astronauts. Will they be HG Wells-y, or 50′s pulp-y? Or more modern?

I settle on a type of astronaut (kind of Dan Dare meets 2001) and I go about sketching them, developing the details in the suit. I want to get that sense of heaviness of the suit, and the way they might stand when trying to look around but not being able to move their neck. Well, for the first guy anyway. For astronaut no.2 I have him bending his neck to his heart’s content. I don’t know why.

After I’m roughly happy with the suits, I need to prepare the ‘elements’ for my jungle. So I need to draw the vines and leaves that I’ll duplicate and colourise to make up my dense, strange undergrowth.

The rest is all done in Photoshop. Depending on the image (and my mood) I use either lots of textures or lots of flat colours. Or sometimes, like for this cover – both. So I get my vines ready by bringing in textures and colours. The leaves I’ll keep flat-coloured.

Once they’re ready I start to build up my undergrowth.

I make some rock outcrops for the background, using my textures. I tend to use all kinds of textures for things, like for example the one used on the outcrops is actually a rough paper texture. Works well for rocks-in-the-distance look!

Incidentally, the colour scheme is just how I imagined it when I was drinking my coffee. This type of blue and pink combo is one I’ve used on a few pieces in the past (including my own branding).

After I’ve built up my ‘staging’, I go back to my astronauts. I draw the outlines on paper in a much cleaner fashion, and bring them into Photoshop for colouring.

I want them to be coloured strangely and brightly. The bright neon-like nature of their suits will bring up more questions (I hope) – like they must be very advanced (but the suits don’t look too advanced).. Maybe they’re aliens too? Also they contrast starkly against the colours in their environment, making them more ‘not-at-home’. Of course, being an eejit I had done all the work thus far in RGB. So upon changing to CMYK, the green astronaut lost some of his neon-lustre.. Bit disappointing, but thems the printing breaks…

The original bendy-neck astronaut doesn’t make the grade, so I do him again from scratch.

Once all the elements are together, I need to continue the scene on to the back cover. So, the idea is they’ve emerged from the dark, strange forest, out into an amazing scene of huge cliffs and loads of moons. So the jungle will stretch into the back cover, getting darker. The idea is: not only can you see where the explorers have emerged from, but you can also let your imagination wonder what it would be like to go in there yourself. Maybe that’s just me.

In my original idea, some of my characters (Robothead and Treehead are regular characters I draw) were going to be lurking in the bushes as the planet’s inhabitants. But I abandoned this for something more subtle – the crow that squats in the vines is the only (or only the first) sign of life, and the astronauts haven’t noticed him yet. He’s watching them, which, to my mind, creates some more uneasy atmosphere. The crow, incidentally, normally sits in the branches of Treehead’s head.. so I managed to crowbar one of my mascots in there in the end… I know, I need help.

So, here’s how the final front cover looks:

and here’s the cover in full:

It was the most fun I’ve had on a brief for a long time. What Punt are doing is badly needed in this day and age. When your Sunday papers are full to the brim of stock illustration, a magazine that champions original artwork, in a time when people are hollering ‘Print is Dead!’ from the top of every New Media company in East London, deserves a lot of respect and credit.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 12th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Illustration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.