Illustrating Pop Culture

We produced a series of illustrations for the online print brand POP based on the HBO series, Game of Thrones. We created an illustration each week on the weekend after the latest episode launched on HBO.

A BLAST FROM THE PAST

This is part of a series of projects that we produced a few years ago for the art print, e-commerce platform, POP. Each of the projects was time dependent - a print was marketed during one week and released the week after.

This meant that we were discussing the work before it was even produced. We really enjoyed the fast past nature of these projects and we thought we’d share them with you.

iPAD TO THE RESCUE

We used an iPad and an Apple Pencil and the Procreate app to produce the illustrations. The work had to be large enough to print so there was a challenge with the memory of the iPad. We had to juggle the amount of layers possible in relation to the size and resolution of the image.

The only reference we had was screen shots after the episode launched. We knew the style of drawing that we wanted but characters had to be continually redrawn to capture a likeness of the recognisable actors while being consistent with the visual language we were developing.

DEGRADED COLOURS

We wanted to capture some of the dread and foreboding of thE season of Game of Thrones. We made heavy use of degraded palettes and had to tread a fine line between toning things down and the images holding enough contrast to be represented well in print.

Procreates use of layers enabled us to use an off-black line to show detail and to use another layer under this to fill in blocks of colours that could be adjusted on the fly.

MARKETING POP CULTURE

Being able to produce commercial prints each week while the internet was buzzing with Game of Thrones speculation meant that targeted ads fell into the laps of a subject hungry audience.

The weekly nature of the project meant that POP could market their current print and quickly switch to speculation around the next week’s offering.