After Christmas comes New Year

I am pretty proud of this illustration. It appeared on the first page of the New Year's issue of the newspaper. On the day when it went to print, a fellow from the editorial staff asked me if I could make a fun looking New Years image. He said I had only about two hours to come up with something or else they would have to print the usual Christmas landscape.

I found an image of the dome church in the archive. The fireworks are from a CorelDRAW clipart image. The photo of the church was taken in fall, so I used a couple of copies of the original where I changed the colours and played around with transparencies to get the right mood. The "rocket- dude" was penciled and scanned - I didn't have the time to ink him. He got his colours in the traditional way - stained glass transparency was applied to the bitmap and behind that different colour layers.

The limited time made this work something of a challenge for me. I made it 2 hours 15 minutes.