Saturday, January 24, 2009

U2 for Rolling Stone magazine. Wrong.


I'm veeeery happy.
I was contacted by Mr. Marco Cendron, art director for Rolling Stone Magazine, to do some illustration work. My job was to introduce NO LINE ON THE HORIZON by U2. I tried to develop their abstract cover (by the japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto) into a narrative illustration that helped me to skip the "draw Bono Vox minigame" step while adding a more dramatic, hyeratic feeling to the piece.
It's like the next image in a sequence with the album cover. Where do these huge things come from? Where are they going? Why did they stop over the city?
I wanted to draw an advent, not a tribute: this was to keep the sensation of a new thing coming, I didn't want to celebrate the old good U2.

Now the funny part. The illustration you see above is NOT the one that will be published on RSM because I was so excited to work with them that I didn't ask for the image W/H ratio they needed.
Guess what? I had to redraw the whole image in an horizontal format and throw away this one :)
Well I was so happy to do some drawings that it was a double pleasure: I did the second image (wich has a wider angle and holds much more details in it) in a night session of work, from scratch to finished color version.
The "right"version of the illustration will be published on RSM March 2009 issue, I will show the final artwork here sooner or later.