I was asked to create an illustrated intro page for a photographic journal book. The theme is Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia. This job was a great challenge and almost didn't happen. The brief was so open which can be a dream project as well as a dreadful one. I wasn't given any particular instruction apart from 'making something that capture the culture of Bondi beach' and a folder of pictures of bikini girls. I understood bikini girls would be a good direction to start with.
I began by doing loads of research of beaches, in particular, the girls. The initial idea I had was to make something very decorative with a hot girl in it. Looking at so many bikini girls picture got me into an awkward place in the studio sometimes. I had to always explain to my teasing fellow artists that they were work related.
The first 3 sketches weren't successful, after talking with the art director in my agency was to develop a day and night theme. We want to show case the Bondi beach community in both day and night. Sun shine vs rock n' roll, that's the idea. So I did a few more sets. They were definitely better than the first 3. The client wanted to see number 3 and 4 with some background in the layout.
Yet they were out there enough, however from those roughs we got the idea to use tattoo graphics as the background. The next rough was a big jump forward.
The client's comment was the girls' poses were not good enough. So I had to make a couple of adjustments.
These ones were much much better, and the tattoo ideas got evolved forward as well. The picture started to work.
After adjusting the girls' pose and composition, here is the final sketch.
A couple of months later, the book arrived. Here are the cover and how it looks in the book.
Thanks for reading.
Joseph J. Ma
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