As Andy has already talked about in his recent blog post, we've had the pleasure of working with some amazingly talented folks during the production of Hardboiled Web Design.

In the run up to the launch on the 19th October, we'll be speaking to some of the people involved and sharing some sneaky peeks of their work.

First up, we've spoken to the uber talented, Elliot Jay Stocks, who has produced some fantastic illustrations for the part openers:

1. Tell us about yourself?

I'm a designer, illustrator, speaker, and author. Although design is very much my day-to-day occupation, I like to keep things pretty varied. For some reason I've never grown out of drawing comic book characters, which is probably why Andy signed me up to do the Hardboiled illustrations.

2. Tell us about your work on Hardboiled?

I've been responsible for the interior illustrations: the two-page spreads that open each of the book's four parts. Under Andy's direction, I created something more 'graphical' than traditional illustrations: a series of images that depict our Hardboiled hero in stark, two-colour scenes.

3. What were the tools and processes that you used?

After Andy and Mark approved my rough thumbnail sketches, I pencilled each scene by hand and scanned them in, tidied up the line work in Photoshop, and rendered them. When everyone was happy with the image, I took everything into Illustrator to create neat, vectorised versions. At this stage I made things even more minimal so that no lines were used at all — just shapes.

You can see the progression of Elliot's work for illustration 3 in these screengrabs:


1 (above): Rough thumbnail layout


02 (above): Raw scan of the 'proper' drawing (pen on top of pencil sketches


03 (above): Linework neatened up in Photoshop and turned into a separate layer using alpha channels


04 (above): Black and white layers added


05 (above): Almost-final vectorised version, created by manually tracing (and then tweaking) in Illustrator


4. Where did you get inspiration for your work?

It was important to reference the strong tradition of hardboiled fiction, and Andy had collected a wealth of source material that I could use. Because the main brief was to create something very graphical and cinematic, Frank Millar's Sin City comic books were inevitably a big influence as well.

5. How do you like your eggs?

Fried and runny in the middle, please.

Look out for our next 'Five Simple Questions' with the cover artist!