Mark Segal and Malcolm Lazin portraits

Hello! Here is a quick rundown of a recent job. They needed some fun portraits of two men who are active in the local gay community since photos seem to be hard to find. The AD came up with the playing cards idea, and he hit me up to see if I could match the playing cards' linear style. It is actually sort of close to how I used to work so I gladly took on the challenge. I was a little concerned that portraying the two as "queens" may be offensive, but I thought it would be fun to execute. Hope the gay community doesn't despise me after this!

It was a lot of fun just looking at various cards and designing the ornament. In researching cards, I realized it really doesn't have to make sense which made it a lot of fun. Originally, the cards were just to be self-contained, but I pushed the "breaking out and dueling" concept; luckily, the AD liked it and only asked that someone's sword be changed to an axe:

Imported vector art

Photoshop magic, note the altered axe-hand (we all make mistakes!). The cards have a weave-texture that sadly, doesn't show up well in jpegs :(

Here is the art in the AD's layout. The cards ended up being separated for the two-page spread; it makes sense for the smaller text to avoid the gutter as well as to make a nice, clean layout:

Thanks to Jesse for a fun assignment, and thanks to you for reading!

Enjoy the Day,
Chris