Banger Magazine 2.0: FRANKIE COSMOS

As well as haim I decided to give another artist a go for Banger, and I chose Frankie Cosmos. She seemed like a good choice and i've been listening to her music too which made me more inclined. 

I actually found this illustration a lot harder than the one for haim, which i felt came quite naturally. I kind of had an idea in my head of exactly how I wanted to look, so when it wasn't turning out like my vision it got really frustrating. 

The idea I had was to keep my illustration in the constraints of a square, to try and simplify the brief for myself (it can be difficult when you have completely free range to do what you like as it's difficult to know how to get started!). I also wanted to include her signature lilac guitar she seems to play all the time as this would be a motif people would recognise her by. 

I started out with this sketch above, and scanned it into Illustrator to start making the coloured shapes to make up the image. I don't know why but I just wasn't feeling happy with it at all, and the more I looked at it the more I started to dislike it! It was so frustrating as it was a brief I had been really excited for, but I just wasn't happy enough with it to see it in a magazine. 

I almost gave up with the idea of it completely, but I decided to give it another go. I thought that maybe I didn't like my first image as it was pretty boring. A lot of my illustration include long limbs and twisty arms and legs, but the one above is very plain. The only thing I think I liked was the colour scheme.

This was my final kind of rough sketch after drawing and rubbing things out about 10 times over, I finally got to something I was a bit happier with. I'm still not that excited about it but I think that might just be because i've looked at it for too long. I was hoping after I had scanned it in and added colour it would come to life a bit more. 

• here's my final illo I sent over to Ellie. I made it clear that they didn't have to use it if they didn't want to as I'm not 100% happy with it, but Ellie said she liked it and that it worked well within the page!
• I can't really put my finger on why I don't like it that much. It might be because I had to keep changing it but I don't know. I guess i'm not going to love every piece of work I make though
• I found it really difficult to make the guitar look good, I feel like theres a fine line between making something look too abstract or too life-like and I couldn't really find a balance
• like I said though, I do like the colours so I guess that's something!