Amelia's Magazine - 123 Bethnal Green Road

Now this was a lot of fun!

I was asked to produce an illustration to accompany an Amelia's Magazine article on the opening of the Sustainable Fashion Concept Store at 123 Bethnal Green Road. I was sent reference photos of some of the weird and wonderful fashionistas in attendance and set to work.

First thing I did was produce some sketches of some of my favourite people in the photos (the guy in the middle especially reminded me of the bit where the Statue Of Liberty starts walking through the city in Ghostbusters 2...).



This sketch gave me an idea for the finished illustration, based on the poster for the film Trainspotting. As with my recent Latitude illustrations, I was a bit concerned about all the different clashing colours creating a bit of a jumble when presented together, so I quite liked the idea to present the images in black and white which balanced the image and prevented certain characters from dominating the scene...



However, there was also something I liked about the crazy mish-mash of styles of these colourful characters, so I also created a colour version of each individual, but after a few attempts, decided that they worked best in isolation, as opposed to interacting with one another.


Fortunately Matt Bramford at Amelia's Magazine liked them enough to include all my illustrations alongside his article. It also made me interested in drawing more portraits and likenesses of people, which feeds in to my next blog post...