Footballing Heroes

This project developed about a month ago. I was invited to contribute to the Footballing Heroes project, now in its third incarnation: http://www.footballheroes.org/

I don't often get to do portraits, so this was a really fun, challenging project to undertake. I started in usual way by doodling in a sketch book and copying photographic reference, but expanded this once the likeness was more or less there. I used both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to build these two images, starting out by blocking in colours in Illustrator and then by adding paint (scanned and digital) in Photoshop. I ended up playing with different versions of each character, mainly tonal changes, but enough to make a noticeable if subtle difference.

Images of the printed versions will follow in due course.

Diego Maradonna

Ademir Menezes...