Lana Del Rey poster

I can finally reveal the rest of my illustration, after the sneaky peek of the eyes I posted earlier this week. I love Lana Del Rey's music, when I first heard her album Born to Die I was blown away and listened to it repeatedly.

This is my entry into a competition to design a concert poster for Lana's three night performance dates at the El Rey Theatre. Lana has a sort of vintage Hollywood glamour, so I wanted to evoke a 1950s silver screen siren feel to it. A lot of things (good and bad) have been written about her on the web, Twitter, etc, but in the 1950s newspapers were the main medium for tabloid scoops of famous figures. This led me to create the background with a newspaper feel of headlines taken from her lyrics.

I always like to push myself and try new things, and with this poster I had a go at adding some texture and grit to it.

Gritty texture to achieve a newspaper feel

And as with all projects, I started off with research and creating a mood board of pics.

The eyes have it

A screenshot of the current illustration I'm working on. I always start with the eyes as they are the most important feature of a person's face.

Although it's tempting to just draw one eye and then flip it round to create the second eye, I don't because the human face is never perfectly symmetrical and small differences in the eyebrows can show different emotions. When the eyes look good, I feel happy that the rest of the illustration will turn out alright  :)