Last September, I was contacted by the Suzuki official team to create a serie of illustrations.

They were about to retire from the MotoGP class, and wanted to create a project to be released at the final race, in Valencia. The aim was to make a serie of 20 vignettes retracing the milestones of the team since they arrived (or came back) in the GP class in 2012.

The project was directed by the PR / Social Media team and was involving Federico Tondelli, Alberto Gomez, Georgia Wells and myself.

They selected 20 memorable moments from the crew's history, and gathered photo references for every of them.

The idea was to create the vignettes individually, and here is the first rough I presented them :

The idea was to create each illustration individually, as it had two purposes :
- Be gathered in a poster to offer to the team members

- Be released individually on their social medias

As they wanted to have a "comics pages" effect on the poster, they asked me to use different format for each images.

We had two approches for the panels. For most of them, I was allowed to freely play around the ref picture I was given, but for some other I was asked to stay close to the original shot (while still transposing it in my style).

Mostly, that was the case for the iconic sittuations, as for Alex Rin's incredible victory on the line over Marc Marquez at Silverstone 2019 :

We had around three weeks to complete the project, which included drawing all the 20 illustrations, creating the mock-up for the poster and editing every vignette for the social medias (adding and placing the text related to each event, defining the right frame and compressing the file for the web).

Most of the panels were around 6-7 hours of work.

The PR team also decided to make a 3x4 meters wide banner of the poster to display in their hospitality at Valencia (we had to redesign the mock up, as the props were different from the poster). My infamous colleague Ranka Fujiwara also had a banner there (you can see his amazing illustration of the whole crew here).

They also asked me to draw a vector illustration for their goodbye party, which was adapted as a flyer, social media banners and also printed on tee-shirts for the event.

The poster was offered to the crew members, and every vignette was posted one by one on the teams social medias (Instagram / Facebook / Twitter). Mir's crown illustration above was among the most popular and reached over 20 000 likes on Instagram, which was a record for my work.

The banner is currently dispalyed at Suzuki World  Shinjuku, in Tokyo.