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PJ Loughran - How to gallery
All images copyright ©2000 PJ Loughran. All rights reserved. Cannot be reproduced or repurposed without permission.

This illustration, whose subject is a remarkable basketball game played by the first Olympic Dream Team, presented a particular challenge for Loughran. The game took place in Barcelona, Spain, in a gym empty except for a few reporters. The All Star squad was split into two halves, one led by Michael Jordan, the other by Magic Johnson. They competed for nothing but bragging rights and glory — and those who witnessed it have said that it was the greatest single basketball game ever played. Not surprisingly, Jordan's team won.

Since no photographers were allowed inside, Loughran had to work from an account of the game that appeared in ESPN Magazine. He decided to portray it as a Clash of the Titans, borrowing many elements from Greek myth in the drawings. Here we show some of the basic techniques used in the illustration.

Step 1:
Loughran starts every image with an ink drawing that he scans in as a backbone. One part of his unique style involves using a brush with long, thin bristles, which gives him a strong contrast between the thickness and thinness of the lines. Here, we can already see the kind of rough, raw emotion he wanted to convey.

Step 2:
All the colour you see here is acrylic paint on illustration board, layered in behind the initial drawing. To get the textures, Loughran painted over masking tape (visible at the bottom left) and then wiped the paint off using a rag. The masking tape adds an "aggravated look" and helps to establish the composition of the piece. Most of the paint here is simply scanned, though the bright yellows behind Magic Johnson were brightened up in Photoshop.		 Step 3:
In this image, Loughran has laid in a lot of colour and brush textures. Most of these consist of scanned pieces of wood and cardboard, as well as old paintings. Loughran's collage technique involves not only images but also colours, tones, and textures.
Step 4:
One way Loughran gets the rough, painterly feel of his illustrations is through channel selection. He normally finds a texture he likes in one piece, selects it, and then applies it to another. Here, he took a section from an old art school painting of his.		 Step 5:
Then, he copied and pasted it into a new alpha channel.
Step 6:
To get a more "angry" texture, Loughran removed nearly all of the grays using the brightness/contrast settings for the selection, by increasing the contrast and lowering the brightness. When he wants a less rough texture, useful for a more "painterly" type of illustration, he generally leaves in the midtones.		 Step 7:
Loughran then loaded the selection into the new image from the channel menu and moved it with the marquee tool to where he wanted it. Then, using that selection, he subtracted from the piece of paint or colour or collage.
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