When I read this brief I didn’t really know where to start! How do you introduce yourself with an illustration… To get started I made a mind map as I found it really helpful in the last exercise. I listed all my hobbies and interests and some things about my life.
I love vintage and retro. I dress in vintage style clothing and style my hair in a 1950’s way – I even wear cat eye glasses. I always wear eyeliner and red lipstick. I knew my love of vintage needed to feature in the illustration.I knew that the best way to show this is to make an illustration of myself.
I am also a wife and a mother of one. As a mum (my daughter has ASD so sleep isn’t always guaranteed) I always have a coffee with me. It’s not the healthiest thing but we all have our vices!
I love video games, I always have and always will. At the moment I play the most on my Nintendo switch. I also love comics and manga – I particularly enjoy horror manga and the work of Junji Ito – I even have a tattoo of one of his characters. This leads us to the next thing – I love tattoos and I have a lot of them!
Here I made a quick sketch and came up with some ideas. When I was drawing the skirt I thought about making the print of my skirt a pattern with drawings of some of my interests rather than a floral design. This was inspired by the previous exercise where I drew the environmental images on the clothing.
My sketch book is a little scruffy, but I use it as a space to think ‘out loud’ and figure out my ideas. Working in this way also allows me to refine my ideas and therefore my main pieces. I have seen some people’s sketch books that look tidy and very presentable – so I hope that mine is okay!
On the pages below I worked on some different thumbnail ideas. The first was an illustration of me with drawings of things I am interested in surrounding me – including tattoo designs, a phone with a podcast, a comic book and a games console. I decided against this one since it was a little too cliche. I wanted to come up with something a little more creative than this. The next idea was an image of me and my dog, and in the background some stacked books. The book titles would have been names of my hobbies or books/comics that I like. Again, this idea just seemed too forced. The brief is for a greetings card, I don’t want the illustration to be too cluttered.
The one thing I was sure I wanted to do was an illustration of me, wearing vintage style clothes and hair. The print of the clothes would be illustrations based on my interests. This got me thinking – I could do the same with the tattoos in the illustration. Instead of drawing my real life tattoos, make them tattoos that tell you about me. My tattoos in real life are mostly black and grey realism so it doesn’t really match my style of illustration!
I also wanted to mimic a sort of tattoo style within the drawing – I don’t want to make the whole drawing a tattoo design – I just wanted to add a couple of features. Vintage style and tattoos go together so I thought I would add a couple of elements from the traditional tattoo style. I want to use a bold black outline, and mimic the way the vintage hair is shown in the traditional lady’s head tattoos, with shading and lines. This is what led to the sketches on the bottom of the right page – the quick sketch showing how I intend to shade the hair and some tattoo designs. The purple sketch is printed from procreate, I made the sketch based on the thumbnail at the top of the page. I decided this was the idea I wanted to go with – so started working based around that sketch.
Katie L'Ala 