Russian Goalie Legends - Sergei Zvyagin, Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, KHL, 2008-2009
The story
The star goalie in the KHL top team Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, Sergei Zvyagin, had during the last years seen David Gunnarsson's art on masks all over the world. Now it was time for Sergei himself to hire David to create his new dream design. He arranged a meeting with David's agent in USA to talk about the new design. In the same time the mask was flown to David's studio in Sweden.
Sergei had a clear vision of how he wanted his new design, he wanted to celebrate his two Russian goalie legends, the hockey legend Tretiak and the football legend Yashin. A more cool and natural theme for a goalie mask is hard to come up with. Sergei also wanted the mask's base colours to be red and white.
David thought about it and came up with the idea to paint one goalie on each side, Tretiak with his red jersey on one side and Yashin in black and whit eon the other. They were painted big for maximum visibility. An extreme detail work now started.
Check out the middle of the design where the red background elegantly turns over to a white background.
Behind both goalies David painted newspaper clippings in cool 3D look, with Russian headlines shouting out the success of the legends.
On the chin the Russian flag proudly flies in the wind, adding to the classic spirit of the design.
All ingredients together create a classic design with a modern look, with both extreme detail work, as always in David's paintings, and a graphically distinct look.