Sitting in a gutter screaming symphony

I've decided to tackle the secret 7 brief because it seems like something you can really play with and the boundaries of what you can and can;'t put on are left wide open.

Chemical Brothers- Let it be  This is the first song I picked to draw about. I decided to look up the lyrics so that I could base the image off of something. I did this because the image has to relate to the piece but not so obviously that it gives away which one it is.
For this piece I based it off the line 'sitting in the gutter screaming symphony'

This was the first idea I liked, someone floating down a gutter. But the little character didn't look right. He didn't look distressed enough to fit the song i think.

So I got to drawing a more distressed character and instead of a paper boat a glass bottle. Because I feel the paper boat indicates some choice in being there and boats normally represent rescued rather than trapped, so the glass prison fitted a lot better. Unfortunately my knowledge of convex glass and the effect of an image inside is poor at best. So I drew them separately to be pieced together on photoshop later.

At first I was just filling in with colour but I decided that to make the distress a key factor then there needed to be distressed aesthetically too. So I started playing with the textures brushes. I'm not normally one to stray far from block flat colour and this was a new learning experience for me. 

In honesty I didn't really know what I was doing with it, I was just adding things to see how they looked and going from there. The road texture was all because I'd started a new layer without realising. The combination of the two textures gave me the road texture I ended up with.

The droplets spattered on the road were actually just me trying to make a cobbled effect but the blue pallet just made it look like water drops and in looking at them in that perspective they are way more effective as water droplets than badly coloured cobbles.

Here I started on the textures of the pavement. From my experiments on the road texture I've learnt that you have to think about it in parts. first I tackled the big obvious lumps and bumps in concrete. 

Then I started adding an all over texture in a much darker colour to be the general roughness of concrete.

Finally I added big cracks in the pavement because the textures I used made it look like a flat object rather than a angled material. The cracks just reinforce the 3d effect.

I coloured the little man in red and yellow with a kind of tribal pattern on. This was actually taken from my 505 project where I was trying to draw humanoid creatures that are insect sized.

Adding the bottle and water textures completed the image so that pretty much every inch was heavily textured. I really like how this piece went. I think even though I was new to texture work I got the hang of it in this piece.