All content - Martyn Johnston

Freddie Mercury:

This was my first ever artistic commission.

Somebody loved the Marilyn one and wanted his own, original artwork of Freddie.

Took me a while to find the right image, and then a long, long time to turn it into a good, workable black & white.

I’ve shown the progress below.

A very slow, and very careful, cut.

I had to get this one just right; it couldn’t just look like a bloke with a microphone:- it had to look like Freddie.

It’s cut from 6 mm thick, pale, fine-grained baltic-birch plywood, on a 1/2” thick black background.

It’s 32 cm wide x 38 cm tall.

Removed from the background.

Black & White image.

Very high contrast monochrome raster (ie pixelated) image.

Converted to vector (ie smooth lines) image and saved as PDF.

Printed with sharp black ‘edge’ and grey background.

Intiial careful line-cut..

Original photo.

Placed on black background, to enhance the contrast..

Finished, and framed.