Ford's Empire

Right, now for recent work for a current project. This brief is a nice narrative based project- illustrating Richard Ford's short story Empire. It's an interesting piece set in the 80's on a train running through western Montana, USA. Since I have a habit of focusing on character based illustrations I thought it would be interesting to push the narrative, and my own boundaries of approach, through evocative backgrounds and locations rather than its characters. My initial thoughts were to treat these locations rather as model film sets and let lighting and photography become part of the final image.

These are some quick concept/ mood boards to get my head around the general Americana, 'western small-town' feel of the text. Again this is all magazine cutout technique which provides some nice flat block colour and nice patches of pattern which is intergral for that "Memphis" 80's look. Work will now start on creating my model sets. I'll keep you posted on any good progress made.