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The Irish Independent asked me to produce a portrait of Brian Boru for a special supplement marking the thousandth anniversary of his victory at the Battle of Clontarf.
In the words of commissioning editor Ciaran Byrne, 'Basically, nobody knows what the f**k he looked like - so that's good!'
This got me thinking about the usual depictions of Brian Boru as a sort of Celtic Chuck Norris. I wanted to show him as a real person. Legend has it that he was 88 years old by the time he broke the power of the Vikings in 1014. Doubtless some exaggeration there, but I pictured a battered old campaigner who had been round the block many times. Naturally the first person who came to mind was Iggy Pop...
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Above is the initial sketch, and some of the references I dug up...
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This is an inside spread of the Battle of Clontarf.
The battle is often depicted as a struggle between indigenous Celtic forces and the Viking settlers who founded the city of Dublin. The truth was of course a great deal more tangled - long-running fueds between Irish clans culminated in a fight for the High Kingship of Ireland, and a complex network of alliances meant that Vikings fought on both sides.
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Here's the intial outline drawing for the battle.
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Colour was added digitally, but first it was necessary introduce depth by dividing the image into layers. I used flat colours to assign figures to each layer.
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