My first post! Pretty excited about it. Though there are still a lot of tweaks I need to make for the blog visual wise. Though I'm in the middle of finals right now for my last quarter of school! So please bare with me until I can actually sit down and mess around with the HTML. :P
This is a mailer I made to send out as postcards. I didn't want it to be too busy like how most of my illustrations tend to get but I didn't want it to be too plain either. I wanted the vibe to be very calm and meditative, to focus only on the beauty of the silhouette and calm. So I chose really subdued color tones, with the exception of the bright blues in her hair, with a lot of shades of gray.
This piece reflects my belief that the portrayal of "a perfect beauty" isn't what it used to be. I see a lot of mothers and young women who choose to express themselves in more alternative means, and I think that's fantastic. I don't think society should judge them so harshly or think them any less beautiful than the models that have perfect skin with no tattoos, no piercings, and with long wavy hair.
At first I did this first sketch of her hair. And while I love this style/fashion, I thought that it was still too "contained" for what I was searching for. In the end I went with a style that one of my close friends used to have and that I always stared at in awe. Especially when she had the long half of it all nice and curled.
Originally I wanted the tattoo to be of Higanbana flowers [http://homepage3.nifty.com/a-hiropy/higanbana-98.jpg] which fit with the calm vibe I was looking for, but in the end I decided that they weren't working with the form and accentuating it well enough.
So I looked around at some different tattoos online and I started to think about henna tattoos. Though I didn't want it to be exactly henna. So I looked at several examples and took some things from them that I liked and altered them to fit the image and the woman's personality more.
When I was done with the tattoo I messed around some with colors since I thought the red might be too intense. In the end I decided on a calm cool brown.
