International Women's Day

I'm working on a concept for a poster for International Women's Day. In it, I'm aiming to paint something that represents my mother and her influence in my life as an artist.

I started off with a few thumbnails, and almost immediately found something to use towards a rough draft.

I wanted something much more visual than simply telling a story with a text wall. I looked to some of Al Parker's advertisement type work for inspiration and found this:

My layout will be similar, but I aim to make the "paint globs" and the text have some kind of harmony together, rather than blocking everything in it's own separate place.

After leaving this for a short time, I returned to it with a fresh mind and fresh inspiration. I evolved the thumbnails and decided on a look and theme; Retro!

I also explored colour schemes. In keeping with the retro look, I want to stick with a complimentary color scheme. I am leaning toward one that is dominantly Orange, since that is my Mother's favorite color.

I've got the general idea drawn out on large paper here. I still need to place my typographical elements in. I worked out the placement on the bigger board with a small sketch to see what would look most visually pleasing before tracing my art onto the masonite.
After that, I started with a single colour wash on the whole board.

Rather than worry about details right away, I tried to focus on bigger elements first. The whole face got color, then I went in and worked out the d=features before moving onto hair and the silhouette of the body. I continued to play with this painting, especially with the highlights in her hair. I feel like I need to be bolder with my colour values, so I am not yet done with this yet.

Okay, so I almost destroyed my mother. No, not my real mother; Painted Mother. I was trying to fix her face and disaster struck. I made it worse the more I tried to fix her, but ended up making more mistakes. There was a point where my paintbrush went flying across the room and I cried "Sweet Mercy, I killed Mom!"

After calming down, I managed to fix it up and it turned out even better. I went out and took high res photos of it so I could pop it into Photoshop and do some colour fiddling.

There! It is now complete! My poster for Women's Day!