01 The mysterious
Melipone artwork
appears on the
frontispiece for
Ubik, with
fragments from
the TV test pattern
motif continuing
right through
to the book’s
endpapers.
01COMPUTERARTS.CREATIVEBLOQ.COMPROJECT DIARY SEPTEMBER 2019
inside, and we explained how we work with
cloths and foils for the binding and cover, and
the need for something interesting for the book’s
special slipcase.
La Boca responded with some roughs, which
weren’t very rough at all. They were pared-back
versions of the studio’s final pieces. These
preliminary artworks were fully coloured up and
that made it easier for us to visualise how the
finished book would look.THE ILLUSTRATION APPROACH
By Scot Bendall
Ubik shifts between past and the future, even
though the future when it was penned in 1969
was the 1990s. I had a sense that a sort of retro-
futurist style would be appropriate, with an
intense colour palette to capture the dream-
like quality of the book and wanted the images
to feel a bit unreal, a little fantastical and not
overtly descriptive.SCOT BENDALL
Co-founder and creative director, La Boca
In 2002, Scot Bendall co-founded the illustration
studio La Boca with Alain de la Mata. With a team of
four creatives, it produces work for film marketing,
book publishers, the music industry and more,
often treating contemporary subject matter in
La Boca’s trademark retro-futuristic style.RAQUEL LEIS ALLION
Art director, The Folio Society
Raquel Leis Allion has worked both in-house and
freelance for Penguin Random House, Little, Brown,
Headline, Orion, Scholastic, as well as at Cartoon
Network for a while. She has won two awards from
the Society of Illustrators for her art direction on
a range of projects.I worked on the illustrations for Ubik with
Richard Carey, one of the four artists at La Boca.
Our process usually begins with defining what
we want to achieve with each image. Here, we
separated the book into sections and looked for
ideas, characters and plot elements to base the
images on. For example, the anonymous man
in the first illustration is Melipone, who is being
tracked by the Telepaths. The bird in the web is a
prophetic scene imagined in the book.
With all eight ideas marked out, we generally
started with rough thumbnails and exchanged
them between us, building up the concepts.
These are usually rubbish and not something
to share with the client but they’re useful to
get the discussion going. Then we moved on to
initial rough illustrations, sometimes starting
with a sketch but other times going straight to
digital – primarily using Wacom tablets and a
combination of Illustrator and Photoshop.
A loose palette of pinks, purples, oranges and
blues was used through most of the illustrations.SEPTEMBER 2019