Adobe Illustrator

For this project, I was really inspired by the new TV show Euphoria, and wanted to do a portrait of one of the actresses from the show. I decided to go with Alexa Demie because I found a photo of her I was really inspired by.

I decided to start with the face, to get the bulk of the work out of the way and to figure out how I was going to go about using Illustrator to create this. I decided to use the blend tool to blend the shapes of the contours, shadows, and highlights of the face together.

Needing to use at least one gradient swatch in my project, I decided to first use it for the irises and tried to mimic her brown eyes with a radial gradient, then made another one for the eyeshadow which was a linear gradient. For the eyelashes I created a custom brush in the shape of a triangle to get a thick to thin look for them. For the eyebrows I used a translucent calligraphic brush.

For the hair I started with a black colour as the base, then added paths on top to simulate hair texture, to the paths I added another linear gradient went from black to blue to black to create a reflection of a blue light coming off of the hair. I also added solid black hairs to create the look of hair growing from the scalp and falling in the natural part.

I originally wanted to omit the necklace because I was already 15-20 hours into this project and was not sure how much more effort I wanted to put in. After playing around and trying to create the neck without the necklace, I decided to just do it since I was struggling to create the neck. Instead of doing diamonds, I decided to pearls since I could replicate the texture as a gradient swatch. I mostly just duplicated and adjusted each row of pearls. On top I added some layers of low transparency drop shadows to get a soft shadow under her chin.

I was not entirely sure what to do for the pattern portion of the project, but I knew I wanted to tie it into Demie and her character in the show. I knew from interviews of hers that she is heavily inspired by the 90s in makeup and fashion. Her character even wears a Chanel inspired outfit on the show. So I decided to incorporate the Chanel logo into the pattern in my background.

I used the same colours as the pearls in her necklace for the pattern and had 2 shapes the logo, and pearl that would frame it. I put the pattern and portrait on a dark blue background to make them pop.

The last thing I had to include was her name, I used the font Modish Regular for this and again, used the colours of the pearls, and added a drop shadow. I paced it outside of the boarder around the portrait to make it appear above of the portrait.

This project reignited my passion for using Illustrator, I learned a lot from the techniques I used and figured out some easier ways to do things and accomplish a better look. Looking back at this project after a year, knowing what I have done since, this was a great starting point for me and I hope I can continue to do projects like this in the future.