I created these art works for a client who needed colourful portraits of his team for a publication. They didn’t want to just insert regular photos of the team members so they posted an advertisement looking for a graphic designer/illustrator/artist to create modern, artistic looking portraits of each of them.
They attached a couple of reference images with a great, messy style which I really admired right away. They both looked unfinished and still complete featuring interesting textures and unrealistic colours.
I was very excited to experiment with a technique like that so I created some portraits myself to demonstrate my capability of doing the job.
The first illustration I did was of the girl with short hair. First I drew the contours and then started to add on the shadows, and textures and more lines, more surfaces, more shades, splashes and so on until this piece was born. I never tired to tone down the contours before so I was quite amazed by the fact the black isn’t always the answer. Using earthy colours isn’t really my thing either so to say but I guess I just wanted to do something unlike me to see the outcome and I was very happy with the result.
art from scratch 