As part of Richard Edwards’ joint project The Age of Wildness and Permission & Cecil and Adina I was fortunate enough to be asked to create 2 pieces of artwork, with this being the first I completed. Richard had a very specific image in mind that he wanted me to create; the references he pointed me towards were the brilliant posters for Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest.

The brief was wonderfully straightforward, and Richard knew exactly what it was that he wanted in the artwork, so the whole process from start to finish was completed fairly quickly. You can see some of the layout variations I explored once I’d scanneed in a pencil sketch and figured out the colours.

Once I had the composition figured out I moved on to drawing the actual linework. It’s not often that people are the central subjects in my drawings, so I felt a slight pressure in not mucking it up, but I’m quite happy with how the final illustration came out.

One thing that I often find challenging is that solid linework such as my own makes for quite harsh faces - which I’ve struggled to manage when illustrating children. Being aware of this helped to temper my approach, and I made a conscious effort to try and use dots rather than lines for any facial details due to their softer nature.

And below is both the final artwork for Cecil and Adina and the mockup for it’s final format(s)! I really enjoyed working on this one, even with the fact that it was outside my usual comfort zone. If you’re interested in seeing more about this project, I did a larger write up on it’s more detailed sister piece The Age of Wildness and Permission.