For this project I decided to do a self directed illustration. I looked around Instagram and found this rockstar (her name is LPofficial) who happened to look interesting to me, so I decided to draw her as a vector. I started with the neckerchief and the lines.

And ended up here. I turned the background picture off. It's always good to double check.
The lines looked really clean as did the illustration draft, so I decided to move on.

I then used the brush tool and added/filled the hair and outlined/filled the Jacket in with the pen, as well as the kerchief. I used strokes to represent the earring. I was going for a clean/flat look, and so far so good. he reminds me a bit of the Rolling stones or Bob Dylan

The illustration with the hair filled in. I really like/d this illustration, but I felt it needed something more, so I went on to experiment with a disambiguation.

I began to Experiment with some color. I began to think that this looked. The original hair got lost within making the file which is saddening, and there's a fine line between flat design and something that looks like an MS paint file. So I moved on and made some changes to it.

For comparison, here is the Illustration without the photo. I started to warm up to it and experimented a little with putting gradients on the beads. I was still bothered by the thick, black stroke. Black is a flattening color and there was some struggle here between flatness and dimension. The head looked flat, while the body has a sense of 3 dimensional space to it that contrasted a bit too heavily.

I decided to do revisions. My process is highly flexible and highly iterative. I like making and seeing different versions. It comes from my process in art school at UNCW where I'd often be advised to draw while making a collage. This version of the piece could stand on it's own as a finished illustration, and it echoes artists like Warhol with his colored print pieces. It also reminded me of The Beatles and the iterative, colorful prints that exist of them in pop art as well as in the animations for yellow Submarine and Sargent Pepper.
Keeping in mind this musical theme (this after all was a rock star), I began to work steadily in particular on the third design. "See you space cowboy" appeared in my head, so I typed it out and I knew where I wanted to take this.

So, I took the illustration and made the color palette overall a little more subdued, adn removes the earring. For the background, I found inspiration in the i posters for Cowboy bebop I had found online, which I had used for comparison. The designers of those often take aa  Mondrian painting and the gritty 70s-esque printing filters used for  pulp movies (most obviously Pulp Fiction and Western films like The Man with No Name). There is also a poster where spike's head is in front of a vectorized barcode, so I tried to mimic that look while keeping in mind the flat aesthetics of Mondrian, which I think is successful.

I could have considered that piece on its own an edition, or as finished. Still-ever the artist, I was not sure If I could be happy with that version. While it could survive on its own as a print, to me, it had too much glaring negative space- a critique of my former art mentor often had of me. So, I shortened the width of the box behind the main art and resized the text. Behind that, I placed a blue box and for motion created a left to right gradient. This was in order to direct the viewers eye to the subject. I also added shading to the areas around the eyes, chin, and ear. While my artist brain still thinks this could use some edits, for now, I would like to think of this as the definitive version.