juan's no. 1 fan

I need to start by stressing that I did not come up with this idea and that I first saw this done by the very talented @/swagvo1d so please go look at their work they are so unbelievably talented!!

But yeah I saw this post last Friday and dropped all other art projects to start this (rip to my Fran study)

In hindsight I do also think this is inspired by @/fishfreeoboecheck’s piece which I’m realising now is quite similar so River if you’re reading this I think you’re really cool and I hope you don’t mind!!

So I think the starting idea for this was that throughout the show we see so many sides of Monty to the point where he may no longer know what is real about him. As many of you can probably tell I have drawn inspiration from the ‘Man Who Never Was’ book cover and used that to be able to draw Bill’s uniform in order to show Monty pulling aspects from his own life to create the character but also that he creates a character for himself that is very like Bill. To be honest a lot of this was done on vibes so the thoughts are incoherent in my own mind but I hope people know what I’m getting at.

This is the cover I used as reference but I also used a really blurry photo of the hat they use on stage so I don’t think the badge I’ve done is very accurate but you get the idea. There’s a version of the book cover with water in the background and I realised that me spending 3 hours rendering waves wouldn’t have that big of an impact on the overall piece so I’ve used a photo I took instead so this one’s multimedia and everything. Of the squares that are Monty rather than Bill, 5 of them are him in the office, three of them are just for tonight and two of them are his costume in glitzy finale. I was going to use his crown and Union Jack outfit but I couldn’t for the life of me find a good reference and the gold sequins were quite fun to draw so I’m not complaining.

Here’s the 30 second timelapse video!! The main one is 10 minutes long but I doubt anyone has time for that, I never really share these on here but maybe someone’s interested in how I did the planning of this.

anyway I hope all of this makes sense and people are picking up what I’m putting down!! If anyone has any questions or wants to chat about this piece and my thinking leave a comment or send an ask maybe we can work it out together! This was fun to do and it’s a while since I’ve drawn Julia, I’ll pop it on Instagram at some point and tag her so hopefully she will see it.