To improve and further develop my drawing of Frida Kahlo I started off by putting in into photoshop and cleaning up the lines using the levels tool. I made the backgrounds white and the lines more black. I then decided to change the head dress a little bit because I liked a different one more, I did this digitally and it worked really well.
Once I was happy with the outline I decided to start colouring the image. I wanted to use tasteful modern colours. To help me out with the colours I went onto the Colour lovers website and chose some nice dusty pastel colours for the flowers I used this as a starting point, I then added my own colours that worked with the palette. I think it worked out nicely and the colours work well together.
I then went on to colour the hair and eyebrows, I just decided on using a dark grey colour so none of the detail in the hair was lost. I also coloured the cheeks and the lips in a dusty pink to fit in with the colour scheme.
I finally added the skin colour. For this I decided to colour pick Frida Kahlo's actual skin tone on photoshop from a photograph to make sure I got a close enough match to her actual skin tone. It worked out matching really well with the other colours that I had chose.
I am happy with how the colour turned out and I think I will stick with this format for my other illustrations. I will now clean up my other illustrations and continue colouring them, I will also create a frame to go around the illustrations.
I know that if I decide to use colour for my image, I want to hint towards a more vintage feel as the setting of the book is the 40's. Im not yet sure weather to go with a classic vintage colour palette or a more modern but still vintage looking colour palette. To help me decide I went to the website colour lover to help me out with ideas for colours. Here are a few modern and classic colour palettes that I really liked. When I start to piece together my image I think that will also help me to decide which colours will work best.
I decided that I wanted to try out screen printing the design for my poster. Before I went to screen print my image I thought that I would test out some colours to see what would work out as I hadn't really tested out any colours previously and because ive never tried out more scandinavian colours before I thought this would help me out a lot. I looked at the research that I had done and selected a few colours inspired from their work, I also looked at some colours on a website called colour lover to help me out with palettes. These are the first two tests that I have created.
The colours in the first design looks a lot more like the colours that the artists that i have been looking at use but when I looked at it I think it looked a bit too barby ish. I do like the colours but im not too sure if they work that well. for the second image i decided to go with a more peachy, orange, autumnal colour for the main leaf but I kept the centre colour the same because I quite like that colour. I think I like the second design more because the colours work better together. Now my next task is to create similar colours in real life when I attempt to screen print my design. I am going to experiment with the colour of paper that I use for my final poster, I have got white, grey and brown A2 paper so I can experiment and see what works best with my design. I also have to decide if I want to include the character from the album cover and if so what colour I would like the character to be.
