For a few months now I've been working on an illustration inspired by Hot Fuzz, and I'm very pleased to be able to 'unveil it' for you all now...
To put it into context before I show you some of the details, basically a couple of years ago I did an illustration inspired by Shaun of the Dead, and not too long after that, I got chance to
interview Edgar Wright for Pixelsurgeon. I figured I'd regret it if I didn't show him my illustration, and it turned out that he loved it, and got it printed onto canvas for his office wall. Thanks to his support, it even ended up in the official IDW graphic novel adaptaton of the movie:
So when Hot Fuzz came around earlier this year, it just felt as if it was time for a new piece. Edgar kindly sent me a collection of high-res stills from the movie, and I set to work. I decided to create a large collage of the characters, in the style of those old movie posters. As a child, I remember being fascinated by this classic Star Wars poster by Tom William Chantrell. I was a keen drawer, and this to me seemed almost magical - I could see it was drawn by hand, and yet it looked exactly like the characters I knew and loved:
Not to say that my new piece is quite up there with that (!), but hopefully you can see that I've been dying for an excuse to create a piece like this for a long long time. What appealed to me in particular about Hot Fuzz was the fact that, in the same way that the movie is both a parody of, and an homage to American cop buddy movies, my illustration could be both a parody of, and an homage to classic movie poster art.
Cut to February this year, and browsing through the photos, I quickly identified the composition I wanted to make, with everything (literally) exploding out from the centre, and made a quick pencil sketch of the key elements I wanted to use. Then I went into Photoshop to assemble the collage for real, and made an outline drawing that would become the basis for everything:
Next it was over to Painter for the colour work. Initially, I worked underneath the line drawing, and made a 'first pass' at all the characters. Some areas are more detailed than others, but generally it's pretty loose:
Following that, I started to work on top of the line drawing, really only leaving it visible at the edges of the characters. This is where all the details are worked in, and I stayed in Painter until I was happy with each element individually, and the overall balance. This image here is probably about two thirds through that process:
Once the Painter work is done, it's back to Photoshop for the finishing touches, improving the explosion and the lighting effects, and generally adding an extra level of drama to the whole thing:
So, I hope you like it! It's a pretty gigantic piece, so I thought I'd show you some details from it too:
