HWASEONG SERIAL KILLINGS

Illustrations for a story about a man that served 20 years in prison after being coerced into a false confession to a series of murders in rural South Korea during the 1980's. In 2019, another man, already serving a life sentence for murder, confessed to the killings.

For this series, we wanted to evoke the gritty realism of a noir graphic novel, with a sense of space and emptiness in the images, keeping the figures in smaller scale, and utilizing the same palette for each. After referencing archival photos from the investigation, I created ink drawings for each of the scenes, and finished each with digital color and texture.

A fascinating story, and the basis for the Bong Joon Ho movie, "Memories of Murder" from 2003.

This series was accepted into the Society of Illustrators’ 2020 Annual Exhibition.

Read the story here.