Camila Batmanghelidjh

The next article for the GER was an interview with Camila Batmanghelidjh, who is a prominent charity worker. She wears fantastic outfits consisting of brightly coloured fabrics of all colours and patterns, and this unique sense of style makes her a fabulous subject to illustrate. I really enjoyed researching her as i found her very inspiring and so i wanted to work hard on this piece, and really do her justice.

Above is the original pencil drawing i did of her.. 

And here is the block outline i created from scanning in my drawing and tracing it in illustrator. Below are the first digitally coloured outcomes i created.

 I call this technique 'digital collaging' because that's effectively what it is. I selected the fabric areas of the image and used the clone tool to colour in the areas with real fabric that i found in various google searches. I tried to have some sort of colour scheme in each image and yet make it quite abstract at the same time.

After placing one of these designs onto the article, i received some feedback from my tutor about how it didn't quite fill the space as well as it could. This led to me extending the image vertically so that it would fit better.

I then asked my team to vote on which colour scheme they preffered, and it was agreed that the green image was most effective. I then spent some time developing the face, as i felt it was a bit weakly coloured. Below are some of my experiments.