Commission: Blade Runner 2049

Commissions can be a fun way to stretch for me as an artist, particularly when it's something that I may not choose to draw on my own. So I was pretty psyched when a buddy hit me up for one last week. This was his answer for what he was thinking:

"May i ask how much a commission based on blade runner would run?

There's a couple things that stand out to me. Its a dark film, with this tense feel around it. But I like the imagery of the giant pink Joi commercial against gosling's character to juxtapose that (so maybe there might be color, and I'd happily pay more if final piece incorporates that)."

Ok, so he wants the 2049 one...

And a very specific scene...

The challenge here is that I do not want(and I imagine he does not want) for me to simply redraw the scene from the movie. After a day or two, I came up with a sketch that I think would solve this problem while staying true to the movie scene that he liked so much.

I feel that this captures the drama of the size difference and keeps the grittiness of Ryan and the city. My notes here show that I plan a super detailed drawing of the buildings in the background to really drive a visual difference between the fore and backgrounds, with some type photoshopped in later at the bottom third. I'm also looking forward to seeing how to solve the large face that would still show the buildings behind her.

I was pretty happy with this, so I sent the sketch out to a couple of art buddies and got this back almost immediately from Bill:

"Nice

Is that a big condom on her face?"

Fuck you, Bill.

So yeah fuck the idea of super detailed pencils. After two failed attempts, this was much more fun as I’m now covered with charcoal and oil bar goodness. Angry vine charcoal lines while screaming along to ATR is highly recommended. And then I smooshed white oil bars at where I thought the building lights would be.

It's at this point that I'm starting to reevaluate the ginormous head idea. Then I get excited to do this:

Clearly the solution is to brush draw with Sumi ink on acetate! This was a lot of fun, and I'm reminded that I need to find ways to do things like this more often. Because this made me very very happy.

And I have a plan for the final image now.

Using the magic of multiple photoshop layers, I knocked out the ink lines and flat colors of Job with screen grabbed images of construction paper(I really liked the textures of the papers), copied those layers to bang out color half tone filters, and then add two white glows right at where her face is at with Ryan.

At the end, I feel very strongly that I was successful on two main points. I drew what was asked for with this specific scene, and I was able to challenge myself to make the drawing my own.