“Where is this greatness I’ve been told? This is the lies that we been sold.”
Sabaton – Great War
This project is one of the bigger ones that I did this year so far. I’ve had some plans concerning a Sabaton drawing for quite some time and with the release of their new album „The Great War“ and their special anniversary show at Wacken coming up, I felt like it was finally time to start drawing. I wanted the artwork to be connected to both – Sabaton and Wacken – as I had my ticket for Wacken and was definitely planning to see their show. First, I wanted the band portrait to be based on live photos of the band playing but as I couldn’t find suitable references I decided to go with “standard promo pictures” instead. The ones that I found on Sabaton’s website were exactly what I had been looking for and so I started to arrange the photos of the single band members until I had a nice group constellation. The next part was a lengthy but relatively easy-going procedure: pencil portrait time! For the background, I used acrylic colours and painted another sheet of paper with them. To bring together portrait and background, I cut out the guys and carefully glued them onto the background which was the most stressful part of this artwork – at least emotionally – as I was terribly afraid of ruining the portrait by making a mistake while cutting. It all came to a good end, though, and you can barely see the cuts at all. For Wacken, I got my drawing printed on a large flag. I took the flag with me and we hissed it in our camp for the entire seven days of the festival.
I recorded almost the entire drawing process and made time-lapse videos that I uploaded to my YouTube channel, so if you’re interested in seeing how I worked feel free to head over there (the channel is called “Miss Escapist Art”, not much of a surprise, I know…).
Paper size: A3
Materials: Faber Castell blacklead pencils, acrylic colors
Time: approx. 20 hours
Reference photos used for the drawing: taken from Sabaton’s official website
Miss Escapist Art 