Slow Motion Heroes

This is an illustration i've been working on for Cork band, Slow Motion Heroes. It's meant to be slightly retro sci-fi, I think it's slightly influenced by Mad Men, which i've been watching loads of and I LOVE! I went for retro due to the bands slightly nostalgic tone, and sci-fi cos "Slow Motion Heroes" made me think of the moon landing, again possibly an influence from Mad Men! I had a pretty solid idea for what kind of font I wanted to use so I drew one myself for it.

God I just noticed there, how many times can I say "slightly" in the one post?!

Other work news, we made our Elvin Beta V3.0 release today, wohoo!

JR - AMAZING

After an INSANELY busy day in work, working on the Elvin Elgg-based social networking platform for learning. Soooo much to do! All interesting though.

For some quick relief, I had a look at some of JR's latest work in Kenya, I LOVE his work, it's awe-inspiring stuff. These images are some of his most famous, from the favelas in Rio and the Kibera slums in Kenya. He highlights the human faces (literally!) behind the social issues we often conveniently choose to ignore and he does it in a positive, humanist way, LOVE IT!

Poster for France / Slow Motion Heroes

Posters for new Cork band, France (now known as Slow Motion Heroes - changed the name just as I finished the posters!).

I spent a lot of time drawing the actual buildings, lots of messing with perspective grids in illustrator & reading up architecture books for inspiration! I also experimented a lot with the style of representation, using real-world textures on the buildings and eventually discarding these in favour of a hand-drawn look. I shaded the buildings using a crosshatch technique with drawing pens, eventually using these for the more muted image and using hand drawn, unfilled buildings for the more colourful image.

The name of the band, "France" being synonymous with a place, I wanted to create a landscape, turning the country into an imaginary city. I had a number of different ideas for the landscape, which eventually pared down to two, as shown above. One involved a fantasy, dreamlike place. The other is more "real world", based on the view from my family home in Carrigtwohill, which to me (maybe not to everyone!) represents a tranquility that results from a certain amount of removal from the rest of the world, but also, conversely, excitement, energy and the possibilities of the great unknown!