One trick pony

A while back I did a series of posters for Bullet Creative in London in an old Victorian "circus-sideshow" typographic style. Which, I have to admit, is something I like doing and apparently it shows as I was asked to repeat the exercise for the latest issue of "Creatie". It's a magazine geared towards the Dutch advertising industry and has a guest editor every month, who determins the theme of the issue. This time it was Sicco Beerda of Euro RSCG and the theme had everything to do with "reality" or "realism" and at the same time "fakeness" and "untruth" I guess.
Anyway on that theme I was asked to start sketching for an article which wasn't quite finished yet. The editor came up with the idea of referencing well-known commercials that played with the idea of "real" and "not real".
They were Cadbury's Drumming Gorilla, Evian's Skating Babies and I put in Axe's (or Lynx for some parts of the world) Chocolate Man.



Right after I presented the sketch, the final article came through and it didn't fit the sketch (or vice versa). The article focused a lot more on certain people who influenced opinion. So the editor decided to keep the style but change the characters, replacing them with the people mentioned in the article.
I didn't mind too much because it gave me a chance to do some portraits. Although I was kind of looking forward to putting ink on that gorilla...

These are the (somewhat dirty) inks of the portraits:


And the finished product:


Click for a better look...