Sargent Pepper (2017)

The idea of making a tribute to Sargent Pepper has been one I have had since I realized that its 50^th birthday was coming back sometime in 2016. It was a backburner idea while I muddled with my Pokémon history tribute and my computer book. Then I realized that 2017 was also going to be my fifth year as a blogger (My first post on the Internet Sketchbook blog was posted in November 2012) and the Sargent Pepper cover provided a great way to celebrate that milestone.

I did want to start work on it as soon as 2017 began and planned to have it done by June (when the original album was released in 1967). But life intervened. It wasn’t until November when work on this tribute really began. In the following weeks before Christmas on any free time I had I was busy with a sketchbook and tablet/phone (for reference material). I admit that the drawings were done in a hurry, so its not my best quality.

Long before that, when deciding who to put in my version of the cover, I asked a couple of friends for suggestions. It was one of them who came up with the great idea of putting in every person who was a “Fifth Beatle.” This idea probably filled up one third of the cover. The rest were a mix of friend suggestions, links to trivial facts about the album, and personal choice.

An original plan I had was to have other artists to contribute stuff to it and to have portraits of them as the psychedelic Beatles in the centre of it. But this was scrapped when I decided to place the VW Beetle in the centre of it. I did get two artists to make stuff for it. There was a third I wanted to collaborate with, but he was too busy. I did consider using a piece of work he previously made (and posted online) as his contribution. I found a piece that would be a good addition and I asked him (UNLIKE SOME). He declined to have it used and thanked me for asking.

I did get two unlikely people to make a thing or two for this tribute. One is a student of my drawing classes and another is a friend who only started taking art recently because of my work. Emma drew the Alolan form Exeggutor and Gary drew Alphonse Elric (I asked him to draw him with a cat inside him. He delivered something way better than I imagined.).

It was in the final week before Christmas that the drawing was done and scanned into Photoshop. It was challenge for my old laptop (the same one I have used to post that first post back in 2012 when it was brand new). It took until about 2am on Christmas Eve that the version you saw was complete. I did think about colouring it in, but there was no time for that (and then I thought about the craze for adult colouring books, so I figured that getting you to add the colour would give you a means to explore the piece more closely….)

But for those too lazy to do that, here it is in full Technicolor.

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