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[ Connect Four - Digital Illustration ]

I came up with the ‘Connect Four’ idea a few years ago. I remember reading news articles about Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan & Lebanon. I thought to myself, “hmm, wouldn’t it be funny if all of these country’s were in a line, like tic-tac-toe or connect four?”

So I look up a map of the middle east, lo and behold the 4 country’s are lined up geographically! I’m like “HOLY SHIT! That’s hilarious!” - So I thought it would be funny to take the audio of the old school 80s commercial and animating the four country’s being gobbled up by the war on terrorism. It makes logical sense, if you build an oil pipeline across the four contry’s, there’s no need to go around Africa, thereby making things a helluva lot more efficient.

That turned out to be too daunting for me to tackle, in terms of animation know-how and my own personal self-doubt. Cut to a few years later, after having met someone with the same passion & fascination with typography & graphic-design, inspired me to start drawing and illustrating. I decided to pair down the animation and illustrate a frame with the same idea.

Everything came together a lot easier than I anticipated, the whole process was a blast and I can’t wait to start on the next piece in the series. Below is a progression of how I refined the piece down.

[ Initial Concept Sketch ]

[ Refined Line Art & Initial Composition ]

[ Initial Color Sketch ]

[ Tweaking Colors & Composition ]

At this point, I felt like the composition was working, but something was lacking. I didn’t like the colors, it felt ‘dead’ to me. There was a certain jovial sense of celebration the initial concept sketch had that this current version of the piece did not. I considered shelving it and just moving on to some other project, but I decided to buckle down and see if I could get a finished piece out of it. I realized I hadn’t drawn out the dollar bills festively flying through the air! I sketched out the dollar bills over a cup of coffee and laid them in. Presto! The ol’ man now had a reason for his, ‘hallelujah’ brother!

[ 2nd to last Final Piece ]

I Added some texture overlays in Photoshop, I originally had them in Illustrator, but I thought that if you scale down the texture overlays, they get all blurry and you ‘lose’ the organic noise of it all. So I decided to comp it in Photoshop.

At this point, I called the piece ‘done’ and decided to move on. I posted a printed piece up next to my desk and something about it still felt, ‘off’ to me. I still felt the original sketch had a certain, “jovial” celebration that this one still lacked.

It’s almost like the punchline is in the middle instead of at the end. After having spent a few days mulling it over…

[ Re-Worked Layout ]

I decided to lay out the elements more along the lines of the original sketch.I feel this is a lesson in, “blink” - first gut instinct thinking. The original layout had the kicker at the end. Now I feel like I’ll need to give this a few days and see how I feel about it later on.

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