Soccer Spread for Front Magazine

In the land where Front is published this sport is called football, so I had to change my terminology a bit when working on this assignment.

The point of this piece is to show an evolution of soccer/football players over several decades. From left to right: the 40s and 50s, 60s and 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s.

You'd be hard pressed to find somebody more disinterested in sports than myself, and I dare say that I have an active dislike for soccer (it's okay, the World Cup is over so you can admit it now too,) so this was a challenge for me on several levels. I'm guessing this was either a very last-minute addition to the magazine or the artist they had lined up for it bailed at the last minute, because I only had about four days to get it done and my deadline was the actual time that the whole magazine was due at the printer. It was down to the wire!

Not that I'm complaining about this stuff; I'm very grateful that they trust me to get last minute work done for them, and I'm always open to drawing subject matter that I would never think to do on my own.

The writer for this piece had a very specific vision for the artwork, so I had lots of details to get right on each player. My main creative contribution was to add the fade from sepia tone to full color, which I thought would be a good way to show a progression of time. As usual, all the white space you see here will be filled with text and headlines.