This is my latest editorial illustration for Dragonbat (my illustrator/Guardian reader rants and sketches blog). I’m writing an article about copyright on the internet, and as usual I wanted a cool illustration to accompany it. The article itself isn’t finished yet – pressures of actual work that brings me real cash money, rather than the dribbles of virtual money these internet shenanigans bring, so I guess I got to prioritize it – but the article is shaping up to be about my half-baked theories on files sharing and other internet copyright issues.
This is the original sketch I did, well not quite in it’s original form, it has been scanned into a computer and I used Photoshop to colour it and turn it into a png 24. I wanted the sketch to have a really raw hand-drawn feel because I knew it was going to be part of a 3d illustration produced with the Blender 3d suite and that would add a nice counterpoint of glossy mechanical accuracy.
I think this comes across very nicely in the completed illustration, it looks like the sketches jumped right off the page of the sketch book and started hopping about in an empty studio as a photographer tried to capture the action on a really fast camera setting.
This idea of action really fits the feel of the image, which is to do with all those tempting files out there almost downloading themselves onto your computer. I mean even if you watch an episode of your favorite show on YouTube, in theory, your computer has to download the file – and some people even capture these files and keep them.
I don’t think this is particularly the type of file sharing that is always making the news as the industry futilely tries to stop it, but it’s probably just as illegal, and I think this dangerous tempting territory is what is invoked by the illustration. I wonder how many of us can claim that there are no pirated files of any type on their computer?
The illustration was quite quick and easy to make, with the usual png on a mesh plane technique, but I really like the results. Now I’ve just got to finish writing the article.
