Persons of Note: Postcard development

I looked at some of Ali's quotes and he was quite well known for his trash talking mouth. One of the more funnier phrases I found was about Sonny Liston and Ali threatening to donate him to the zoo and mocking him for being a bear and smelling like a bear. 

With this idea in mind I started looking at the video of the fight again and trying to capture Sonny Liston as a bear. My first few attempts I used pencil as I'm trying to get better at my pencil work. After a few failed attempts I reverted to ink and watercolour. I was actually pretty with my drawings of bears as I've never drawn them before. 

I drew a few different scenarios but decided to move away from it before I got too attatched to the idea. 

I thumbnailed different elements of the fight. 

 I started thinking about Ali as sections, I drew his lips to show how he was as much about the talk as he was the fighting. I drew his feet to show speed,  eyes to show focus.

I preffered some of these ideas over the sonny liston is a bear ideas. I started to think about they would come together as postcards. I knew I wanted them black and white. The feeling I wanted to potray was a sense of tension and a darker attitude as watching Muhammad Ali fight put me on edge and his attitude was very fight or die, it was noted in various interviews that when other boxers would have gone down, He carried on fighting depsite how much it would have hurt. 

I introduced the idea of a bee, to fit in with the quote he is most associated with "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" as it also sums up his fighting style quite well. 

The bee represents the enormous amount of tension in his fights and his attitude. I tried out a few various ideas. My original idea for this was to do it all in ink. 

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However I decided to draw a section in pencil and I knew immediately it suited the tone so much more than the ink. I tried out finerliners and red ink also but nothing else suited it as much.

As I developed the postcards I introduced a thick black pencil frame, it made it more cinematic and suited the atmosphere.

I copied the files and took them into photoshop to brighten them up. It was at this point i wasnt sure whether to keep them as colour and had to ask some other peoples opinions. The general reaction was yes to convert them to black and white. Once I had i immediately saw that they fit in with my stamps much better in black and white. 

One of the problems I faced when I was making the postcards was that I drew the bee too small on one of them and I didnt want to re-draw the whole thing out again. Instead what I did was cut a small piece of paper out and stick it on top to redraw that certain bit. This is a tip I got from Madeline Flores (an illustrator who creates numerous amounts of comic strips) and this is one of the first times I've used it. It worked really well and using the stamp tool in photoshop helped me eliminate the slight shadow left by the piece of paper. 

                                 I was really pleased with my final postcards, mostly because I had used pencil (and a small amount of ink on the bee and butterfly) and I have never created a piece of work with pencil that I liked before. It gave it a nice atmosphere to the postcards.