All of the artwork for these banners is 100% digital. An approach I usually don't take, but for what was needed, I think worked best. They were all designed to have transparent BG's since there was a pre-existing BG for them to be placed over on the site. I threw some flat colour into the BG's on most of them for this post.
These first two were tests essentially so that I could dial into a style that they were looking for. In the end, I ended up using a different style for almost every banner. It was actually quite fun.
Here, I was attempting a kind of photocopied, high contrast look similar to the opening titles for the TV show CHUCK. It instead ended up being a little more tonal than I wanted. Doesn't matter, they didn't like it.
Feeling the portrait approach for the Morning Sickness was odd since I usually draw the morning show as very cartoony caricatures, I attempted a digital painterly approach similar to the awesome work of Kevin Dart. Only Holmberg got into this attempt because the test was shot down by everyone.
Unsure of where to go next, I moved on to some of the other DJ's.
Larry McFeelie loves Star Wars so, it was a no brainer to attempt a Drew Struzan look for his banner. I'm relatively happy with the outcome. I was concerned I wouldn't be able to capture that look using 100% digital, but I think I did a decent job of pulling it off.
The banners on the final website, http://www.98kupd.com are quite small and on some of the portraits I worked a lot bigger initially, like the McFeelie image so, here's the full version... I wish the hands were done better. Initially they were going to be cropped out of the banner entirely, but then the final dimensions were changed. Hopefully I won't make that mistake again, and make EVERYTHING as good as possible, just in case.
Next up was Fitz. For his banner I went with an image based on an artist that drew a Henry Rollins SPOKEN WORD shirt that I got at one of his shows. If I knew the artist's name, I would certainly credit his or her inspiration. I think I saw that they smartly changed the graphic on his shirt to 98KUPD for the actual banner.
The Shan-Man was just a quick painterly sketch. Just seemed to work for this one. Don't know why.
And then Bret Vesely; some refer to him as the overnight girl. My approach for him was Shepard Fairey. I looked at his Obama Portrait amongst other things. At this size you can't see that the tonal treatment is actually all lines, but it is. Most of these styles were quite a stretch from my normal cartoony style. I haven't had to do actual portraits or realistic drawings since art school.
Now it was back to THE MORNING SICKNESS. Even though they had said they wanted something different, I think I went too far from what they're used to. This time I went with the same style I used for the FITZ image. It was different enough from how I usually draw them, while still echoing what they've come to expect from me. It was approved. Success!!!
It's the small victories folks.
