the Twirl

Before I start explaining this piece I should start by explaining where this piece comes from. Although Illustration Friday is a great motivation to do some artwork and play with styles I wouldn’t normally feel comfortable playing with on a clients piece, I feel it’s also a little to easy to fall into one’s usually safety nets with these self motivated assignments. This week, in order to push myself, while waiting for the illustrationfriday website to refresh and for the new theme to be announced I laid out a few ground rules; no mater what the topic, my illustration would include at least three people and a complex background.

And so it is, with at least three people and a background, this weeks topic is ‘Twirl’. The theme for this piece is grounded in the hair twirl. The concept for this piece based around body language, the flitting hair twirl, the ‘social mirroring’, and the couple who are obviously disinterested.

My sketch for this started off really rough while I worked out the composition.

From there I cleaned things up a bit before blocking in some color.

Then the next step is to destroy everything and paint over, then paint over again and again until many hours later, voila! except for some details to make it pop, it’s finished.

As always, I’m just trying to experiment and to learn something new. Comments and feedback are always welcome.