Edith WeUtonga approached me to design her CD sleeve. The album title was Utonga which means dawn. The theme being a dawn of a new era after she survived a fatal accident which left her physically scarred and launching her solo career.

There were no photos to work with so had to do a shoot after she had come from a two hour bus trip and with no extra lighting. So I improvised and chose the above picture. I liked the innocence of the pose and the fact that it also naturally hid the scar on the left side of her lip.

To incorporate the dawn i picked a picture I had taken a few years back with my first Nikon camera, the E5000. It was actually a picture of a sunset over Florida lake. 

Initially I wanted to use the sunset as a background but it wasn't working with the image. I also decided that the image was not working well in colour so I took out the colour and settled on a greyscale. I had deep etched the afro and thinking of how I would work with it.

After a couple of tries I decided to mask the sunset image with the afro and settled on that image.

The final CD Sleeve.

For the T shirt I was inspired by doodles I frequently do while talking on the phone on my sketch pad which I use as the mouse pad. I had patiently waited for a project to use my doodles on. I had just done the above doodle and I wondered how I could incorporate this into the design.
 

I turned back to the afro again and this time i used my doodles to make up the afro.

I refined the final sketch taking out extra shadows and lines. Then converted into a vector graphic for scalability.

The final Edith WeUtonga Tshirt