Swine Flu - ATTACK

This is a picture I worked on a while back as a companion piece for Viral. I never posted it on the blog and it seemed perfectly appropriate for this week's IllustrationFriday topic, "germs".

See the little green piggies? They’re coming for you.

...that reminds me. I'll need to look into getting vaccinated. I don't want to get sick/get other people sick, at all the art and anime conventions next year.

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Sketched on 9”x12” Strathmore Bristol, finalized and painted in Photoshop CS 3. The image came together over a couple of days.




I used this picture and Viral on my most recent self promotion postcard. The explosive word bubble on the front is where the addressee sticker goes, but you can just imagine he's coughing his lungs up.

Viral - Finished

Viruses are fascinating little cellular machines. Since viruses are inert and virtually lifeless, they require other forces to spread them around. When a virus, like influenza, stumbles into a specific type of cell, like epithelial tissue, the virus activates. It breaks through the cell's defensive barrier by providing a forged protein passkey. Once inside, the virus assumes control of the host's biological machinery, and uses it to replicate itself. The cell makes so many copies of the virus that the pressure eventually ruptures the cell and new viruses spill out, infecting the surrounding cells.

That's some scary stuff!

Here's hoping we never see another influenza epidemic like this one.

So make sure you get vaccinated. Don't let the viruses win without a fight.

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Sketched on 11”x14” Strathmore Bristol, finalized and painted in Photoshop CS 3. This one took somewhere from 2 weeks to forever to put together. The four point curved perspective made the picture maddening, but I persevered.

Viral - From Sketch to Colors

Sketch

Color concept

Viral - This'll be the Death of Me

Just in time for pandemic swine flu, my latest editorial illustration is about a disease spreading in an urban population center.

I'm 2.5 days into the sketch. Like NASA planning a trip to Mars, I'm being very methodical with this project, carefully plotting the position and height of characters and objects along their curved paths in three point perspective.

Tomorrow, I'll move from concept sketch to rough sketch.