Christopher King, Freelance Illustrator & Graphic Designer

SELF PORTRAIT -

I wanted a nice friendly picture for my profile page and ended up drawing myself as a chain smoking 50’s throwback.

I’ve been deep in noir land recently. I’ve just finished reading Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Big Sleep’ (which was excellent) and have also been watching lots of 50’s Hollywood noir movies including the Bogart version of The Big Sleep as well as Sunset Boulevard, Maltese Falcon, and Double Indemnity. You could say I had something of a genre overdose. The result is a slightly skewed self portrait that started of looking like me (beard and tash) but evolved into a vision of myself as some sort of Philip Marlowe detective character. Added to which the series ‘Madmen’ has become rather popular and it’s influence has snuck in there too.

Inked using only brush work this time, I actually rather like the outcome. The original drawing itself ended being rather large (two A2 sheets sticky taped together) thanks to the introduction of the hand holding the lighter and had to be scanned in bits and put back together in Photoshop. I kept all of the shading elements separate to allow me to experiment with colour which would be done in Adobe Illustrator after everything had been brought back together. I’ve kept the colours minimal in keeping with the noir aesthetic and added a very subtle pin-stripe to the suit to bring it out from the background. I do rather like it. One of those un-intentional but worth sticking with drawings.