Spartathlon

Here's one of two illustrations I recently produced for the Telegraph. Another interesting piece which I was again left to interpret in my own way, thank-you Telegraph!

The copy was an exert from a book and really was fascinating. The Spartathlon is a gruelling 152 mile run. It was beautifully written (I was lucky enough to get the unedited copy) and delved into why people take on such huge physical tasks but most interesting for me was the description of the mental aspect of the run, especially during the night.

I was commissioned to do one illustration but after rough stage it was decided to use both ideas. The fist aimed to capture how small the runner was in the face of such an undertaking and to capture the feeling of loneliness and solitude described in parts especially at night facing a mountain run, I used the mountains magnitude as an analogy for the enormity of the task as a whole . The other was to include the statue of king Leonidas, the runners kiss his feet at the end of the race (if you make it that far, not many do) and I wanted to show how this run can crush the runner with the statue looming over him.

In a nice addition to the commission the author who wrote the book from which the copy was an extract got in touch and bought a print of one of the illustrations from me!

Medium - Photography, pencil, acrylic, photoshop.

I'll post a couple more of the shop magazine covers soon and a illustration I have just done for the Radio Times.

Bye for now.