Illustrating Real Madrid's Vinícius Júnior and his new Nike Football boots
Deep purples, hot pinks and shiny chrome in my collaboration with THE LINE
Towards the end of last year, I was contacted by animation studio supreme, THE LINE, about painting Real Madrid star Vinícius Júnior in a collage-style movie poster, for the launch campaign of his exclusive forthcoming Nike football boots, and naturally I was thrilled! Over the past few years I’ve been gradually expanding my portfolio with a few football-related pieces, an area I’ve always wanted to work in alongside movie posters and ‘geeky’ culture, so a few months later it’s been fantastic to add this one to my growing collection, and to have finally created artwork for Nike, a long held ambition of mine.
Here’s the final portrait version of the poster…
Once I saw the boots (after signing the NDA of course) and found out what they’d been planning and what THE LINE (and the advertising agency, Ultra) actually wanted me to do, my excitement levels went through the roof. Obviously I love making movie posters for real movies, but making movie posters for fake movies comes in a very close second! It’s such a fun space to play in, in terms of establishing the right genre and feel with the composition, and then also using type and graphics to bring it all together. The bright pink boots, also known as ‘sunset pulse’ also lent themselves to a rich deep palette of dark purples and blues.
Ultra describe the whole thing much more evocatively on their project page:
“When it comes to attacking flair players, they’re usually boxed in as either fast or skillful.
What makes Vini Jr different is his relentless drive and ruthless efficiency. No stopping. No half-measures - and that became our positioning: All Grit. No Brakes.
We cast Vini Jr as the driver in a high-octane, petrol-fuelled getaway film. We then leaned into the raw visual codes of car culture - neon haze, souped-up engines, street racing, drifting at full throttle.”
Sounds pretty good to me!
THE LINE had also brought in renowned poster artist Ruiz Burgos, who had been hired to explore layouts of the ‘hero’ poster starring Vinícius, enabling me to start working on some of the detailed paintings earlier than I would have been able to otherwise, including the portrait of the kid sitting on the car hood which you can see below*.
*Slight tangent: I want to be clear that unlike the main poster which was all my own artwork, I only painted the kid on this piece, and other talented artists worked on the background and car. The leg positioning and boots also changed slightly in the final version. This collaborative approach reminded me (in a good way!) of my days as a freelance designer, where work would be divided up in all sorts of different ways depending on deadlines and relative workloads.
Having worked purely as a solo artist for the past decade really, it was fun to see the work coming together with everyone pitching in, and superb art director Juancho Crespo guiding us to ensure it all worked together. The same goes for the piece featuring the boots below. A lot of the legs and boots are mine, but other artists picked this up when I was then working on the main poster.
Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, Seeing Ruiz Burgos doing his thing on the rough layouts each day was really exciting, and I couldn’t wait to get started on bringing them to life by painting the final assets of the main portrait, the action pose, the car and the stadium. I worked on the layouts a bit too depending on the schedule.
All through the process, producer Adriana Piasek-Wanski was fantastic, making sure everything was ticking along on schedule, both in terms of getting assets from the client, sharing progress with them regularly, and so on.
I also have to thank the Head of Art Juancho Crespo for being such a superb art director. He was always super clear with his feedback, but also gave me room to play, so it always felt like the artwork was getting better as we iterated and finessed it. A key challenge was the fact that the lighting we wanted to go for, wasn’t actually in the photography of Vinícius that we had to work from, and we didn’t have any pictures of him wearing the kit or new boots. THE LINE were super supportive about helping to source reference, whether it was photographing specific angles of the boots, sending general inspiration for the mood and everything else in between.
Projects like this can of course feel very intense, but I enjoyed our daily video meetings and it was a privilege to get a sneak peek at the animation work that THE LINE (who are primarily an animation studio, producing frankly amazing work) were making as part of the campaign.
Once everything was signed off, just like with any other project, we all moved onto different things, and before too long it was Christmas. It’s always a bit surreal when the campaign is finally launched, but to see the artwork up on Nike’s social media and on the Nike Football website (with different versions of the artwork getting served up on desktop and mobile) was really quite a thrill.
Whilst the painting of Vinícius, the boots, car and background represented the majority of the work, I’ve often created custom typography for physical media releases, so I was more than happy to paint the chrome effect on the main title by hand, and really help the poster lean into 80s action movie territory! As a kid I used to love trying to making lettering look shiny, and frankly that thrill has never left me.
On the build up to the launch, it was cool to see Vinícius posing in front of a custom car featuring the lettering on the windshield!
Thanks once again to everyone at THE LINE for being great to work with, and for inviting me to play on such a fun campaign in the first place. I should also say that the icing on the cake was the fact that Vinícius Júnior signed off his likeness first time around! You’ll find this project (without all this context/waffle!) on my portfolio site.
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