The Restless - CD Cover

This was our first project for Advertising Illustration, a CD cover for a band. Our professor, Ryan Sanchez, didn't want to put any images in our heads, so he gave the band a fictional name, "The Restless" (real name is Matty Charles and the Valentines.) We all listened to the CD and came up with our own ideas.

The CD has a recurring theme about traveling. In the thumbnail process, I tried to keep humans out of the picture since we don't know what the band members look like and I didn't want to assume "Oh, folk, country-sounding music, guys with cowboy hats and cowboy boots." I adhered to the places the protagonist might have seen while traveling or objects that allude to traveling, for instance, a train; as well as important objects related to the story: his guitar.

First comp sketch:

 Playing around with a map background. There were more comps after this one but I didn't include them since they were more of the same image except for different camera angles and tweaks on the train/guitar elements.

My dad is a huge rail fan and train modeler so I had his feedback in order to create a train that a rail fan would somewhat approve of (the rest I attributed to artistic license haha.) Using a lot of reference pictures I was glad to find more train/guitar elements that worked together. The bridge of the guitar as the cow catcher, the sound hole of the guitar as the round front of the train, and the neck of the guitar as the chimney (steam trains are my favourites, too!) A LOT of tweaking was done to this as to have the viewer go "Oh hey look, it's a trai-- ohhh wait it's also a guitar!"

Graphite with revisions after the comp:

Final with gouache:

 

All images ©Tatiana Dengo 2010.

Musaraña - My first published work!

This is the big project I worked on this summer, a spread for Revista Musaraña. This is a bi-annual publication published in Costa Rica. It combines art and literature,  assigning writers and artists in pairs in order to produce a collaboration based solely on their own inspiration.

 (cover design ©Mariela Montoya 2010)

I had the pleasure of illustrating my friend Sofia Gonzalez's story. We played with the idea of the ways in which we imagine the world works when we're children. In this case, our protagonist believes electricity is produced by an underground army of hamsters, until he reaches adulthood and starts going a little bit nuts.

Sofia and I favoured the idea of a triptych, for both the text and the illustration.

This was my process:

Comp:

 Sofia: ... is that a hamster hugging a mattress wearing a diaper?

Tati: ... yes. And that is the one and only time you will ever ask that question in your life.

Graphite:

  After three years of playing around with every imaginable medium, I'm starting to settle down with this graphite/colour pencil and acrylic/gouache/ink technique. First you set the values down with graphite and then add the colour in with any of the aforementioned mediums. I prefer gouache because of the lift-off but in this case I used acrylic and ink since it's what I had available in CR. This picture only shows the two ends because the middle was... let's say freestyle (because it's not improvised if I had already planned what was gonna go there, yes?)

Colour:

This was a quick picture I took. I wasn't quite done by this point, but all I did after that was make the colours MUCH more vivid.

Final:

(Click to view larger.)

Printed:

All images ©Tatiana Dengo 2010 unless otherwise stated.
Story text seen in the pictures ©Sofia Gonzalez 2010.