For the third time I’ve had one of my illustrations included in a Printed in Blood artbook. The first two were the Stranger Things artbook and the Ghostbusters artbook, plus I have two more artbooks coming up that will have my artwork in them. The next book, coming out early this fall, will be an Aliens artbook!
For the Firefly illustration, Printed in Blood printed it on a full page, with an opposite page featuring a quote from the show and a segment of the illustration printed in black and white. I’m super happy with how my illustration received a full page spread, plus I love the quote they used!
Process of the design
The origin illustration is 11×14″ and is mixed media. I used acrylic paint on the background and a mix of Copic markers, gouache, and polychromous pencil crayons on the center, main image. The background uses the common colours of the show, a reddish brown and yellow. I included the Kanji (Chinese characters) that are part of the show’s logo but didn’t want to have the characters look like they were just slapped on. So I decided to have the characters flip to a negative shape when they crossed the circle. I think that made them look a little more dynamic and well integrated into the overall design.
Did you know the Chinese characters on the Firefly logo mean “Serenity”?
I wanted to include a portrait of each of the ship’s crew along with an iconic item for each of them, but the drawing became too busy so I only included iconic objects for a few of the crew. For Jayne I drew grenades and for Wash it was leaves, and I had the two items falling in a similar way to add a bit of symmetry. The ship itself is a character on the show, so I thought it would be cool to use the outline of the ship as a frame for all of the characters. Overall I’m pretty happy with how this turned out!