“And Now For A Little Comedy Sketch …”

An interesting little digression away from our usual flummery, people, courtesy of Scamp. Fintan Taite was … no, let’s allow Fintan tell the story. Fintan, you rascally drawing-type scamp, sir? Take it away …

“Hodder Headline commissioned me to do an illustration for the cover of Twenty Major’s first book, THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX PARK, based on characters from his profanity-filled popular blog: twentymajor.net.
“At the time of commissioning there was no text from the book available so I was sent a description of the characters and a brief outline of the plot. They also supplied me with a rough sketch their cover designer had put together as a guide. The illustration was to take up about 50% of the available cover space.
  “The first thing I noticed about the rough was that all the characters had their backs turned, which I immediately had major reservations about … I felt the coarse humour of the book and blog would be much better served by establishing what the characters looked like at a glance … and to be honest, much more fun to draw from my point of view. I did a quick character sketch of Twenty and sent it off to the art director to show how I was thinking …”

For the rest, and to see how the cover art was built up frame-by-frame, jump on over here. Or here. We’re not fussy …