Nightmare

These are a few illustrations I did for the magazine Zeilen [Sailing]. The article, titled 'de Nachtmerrie' [the Nightmare] was the true story about a young Dutch sailor traveling around the Caribbean islands where he got found himself blackmailed (over a bogus poker debt) by Colombian gangsters to transport a shipment of drugs to Europe.
It's a harrowing story and the poor guy is now locked up in a French jail, where he can't even defend himself in court for fear of retributions as even in prison the gangsters threatened to harm his loved-ones if he were to testify.
Anyway... the illustrations; the first one is the main one, the other three are fillers.

Extra Extra!

Well a week has passed and I've made the front-page again... surprisingly. Last week I posted an illustration I did for newspaper "De Pers", about the financial crisis. The accompanying article asked readers what a suitable punishment would be for the bankers, accused of being greedy and f-ing up the global economy.
The verdict: the bankers should be forced to go to work in full clown get-up.
So everybody would know not to take them too seriously and trust with too much of their money, I guess.
Anyway I did a new version of the vulture I did for them last week but this time, you guessed it, in red nose, blue wig and make-up.





An interesting little side-note the vulture I did last week got some t.v. attention from a show called "Rondom Tien" (a topical, serious talk show here in the Netherlands) devoted a show to the financial crisis and the whole 'blame issue'. And halfway through the show the presenter whips out a copy of last weeks De Pers and goes "Illustrator Martijn Rijven shows us this vulture in a pinstripe"... Well, the live studio-audience and the guests all agreed: This was going way too far... outrage!

KUMOKUMO

I only just noticed that a good friend and college-colleague Bas Smidt has also been keeping a blog. Lot's of interesting graphic design stuff on there. Check it out: KUMOKUMO

Hot off the press...

Last week I did an illustration for Dutch newspaper 'De Pers' (which is Dutch for 'the press'; explaining this posts lame pun title). It's out today (the second dimension to the lameness at the top). To my slight surprise they used it for the front page. The dimensions they gave me weren't big enough so they had to blow up the illustration to make it fit, coupling that to the fact that they print at 200dpi for some reason, made the piece turn out a bit fuzzy.
ANYWAY....
The article is about a story you might have heard before: the wa.. bankers of the world, running the global economy into the ground, having taxpayers bail them out and then demanding bonuses to boot.

Here are the initial doodlings:


The cleaned up drawing and sketch I presented to client:


And the final thing:


And the finished result as they used it (explains all the space around the bird):


This concludes my blog of today, thank you for viewing. Please feel free to leave a comment.
Cheers.