Recently, a rad group of Vancouverites have been holding a series of art shows based around pop culture icons. Most recently, they announced Drop It Like It's Art, with a call out for art about Snoop Dogg/Lion.
For my submission, I discovered a fantastic photo of Snoop smoking, while wearing a rasta headpiece. It fits perfectly for his recent transition from Dogg to Lion, so I drew it, pencil/graphite on paper.
Rather than just stop there, I wanted to vectorize it so that I could have more flexibility with the end result, so I scanned the original drawing, brought it into Photoshop, and blasted it with exposure, levels, and brightness/contrast.
Plus some creative dodging in the smoke, etc.
In Illustrator, I played with live trace settings, until I created a look that complemented by illustrative style yet added some great punch to the composition.
Sampling from the original photo, I started blocking in colour...
and then a nice little accident happened...
After cutting up/masking sections of the photo for the purpose of sampling colours, I turned more layers on, and totally dug what I saw...
... the combination of bits of photo poking through the digital colour and vector illustration looked rad!
So I played with this composite look, tweaked where necessary, and BAM! There you have it!
Printed 19"x13" for the show.
Printed 19"x13" for the show.
