When I design football fans I feel like I activate every one of my strengths. Conveying a vibrant personality through a sense of style is always a lot of fun. With each one I become more interested in fashion and how to utilise it to squeeze more attitude from my drawing. My college education consisted of Product Design and this feels in some ways like I’m coming full circle.
Presenting a set of four unique characters felt like a good policy for social media. I set to work over the course of a week and created chronologically; the Bayern fan, The Newcastle fan, the Messi fan and the Leeds fan. I’m more than happy with the first three, I feel I skimped on the last one, it’s half cooked compared to the rest.
The finished work feels like it’s straddling a few intersecting areas and benefits greatly from the frisson. Combining support of a sports team with fashion and then weaving current affairs subtly into the final work produces an emotive result.
In stark terms the fans are containers to apply branding to with the final aim of tagging multiple accounts on Instagram. I see this through calculated eyes but I also deeply love creating them and feel genuine pride with the results. I have some more work in this vein in the pipeline and as with all my work I feel like the current thing I’m working on is the best thing ever. I’m excited to share it when I can.
To create a fan I find a reference photo, then I tweak elements of the pose. When drawing my version I will adjust pieces here and there to ensure it’s original. The clothes will usually change and I’ll wing it in terms of styling the character. I take a few days to arrive at a final piece, this ensures I keep seeing the piece with new eyes and any mistakes get ironed out.
With the character that ended up as the Messi fan I initially had a different take, posted below, which didn’t feel right. I took it back a few steps and redesigned elements. I played around with colours over and over until I arrived at something that popped. This is a stage I spend a long time tweaking. Saturation of the background needs to be just right to activate everything in the foreground.
A majorly simplified look at the design process.