I’ve just written a Public Enemies Film Review, a review of the latest Johnny Depp movie for the review section of my Spiralcat writing and entertainment site. It’s a great movie and the decision to review it was a bit of a split second impulse. I knew that I didn’t have much time to write the review, never mind illustrate it, but I knew I wanted it to be the best it could be, and that meant including a picture of some sort.
So in the interests of speed I opened GIMP and attached my drawing tablet to the computer’s USB port. I chose my first colour, a very deep blue, and began to sketch in lines very quickly with the stylus. In my mind I immediately saw a stereotypical image of gangsters at night silhouetted against the moon and a cityscape, and I decided to go with it for my illustration, because Public Enemies is a gangster movie of the old school, and Johnny Depp plays an ordinary gangster, not some scene stealing show stopper like in The Pirates of the Caribbean.
I wanted to add a little extra to the image however, and another scene from the movie jumped to mind. There is scene where the gangsters are holed up in an out of the way hotel and then surrounded by the FBI. Led by Johnny Depp they shoot their way out in the middle of the night, and the flashes of light from the muzzles of the gun are huge in the pitch black darkness. I wanted to add a hint of that scene to the illustration, so I added a machine gun and a huge muzzle flash, and I reflected the light from windows in the building’s in the background of the image, and even in the shiny areas of coats and hats, and of course in the gangster’s eyes.
It’s a very raw and quick illustration done almost entirely by scratching away at the tablet with my stylus, and with only a few areas of flat colour added with GIMP’s vector illustration feature. It looks a bit comic book, a bit pulp fiction, and it’s perfect for my Johnny Depp gangster movie review.
