GIANT NOSTRILS OF DOOM

The Maccabees - Go Was the final song I decided to do.  From what I understood of the song it was about a break up. About two people who were having problems and were trying to fix it but at the same time knew that their attempts were futile and there was only one course this could take.

This was my initial sketch. I was trying to make the image balanced and equal. Looking at it now I don't think I made the pushing apart urgent enough and instead once coloured they look like they are just leaning on each other. It was also pointed out that my eyes of doom without any other facial features just look like two giant nostrils. So I have accidentally created battling nostril creatures that live in a cardboard box. 

The box was there to represent the sagging and falling apart life they shared. I decided to go down a route of brighter colours in this one to make it bright and eye catching. 

I wasn't really sure what kind of colours to use so I was going down my usual route which is choose colours that I think go together and then when they inevitably don't I use hue/saturation tool to change the colours. 

These colours somehow look too light and innocent. These are the colours of a small boys toy and that is not what I'm going for.

This seemed more close to a good pallet but the green of the box doesn't fit in with the rest of it.

Now the box was a more fitting colour I added a background colour to make them less stark looking on the black background. The pink however was too close to the pallet of the monsters and I felt like it needed something contrasting to make it pop and feel balanced.

In the end I quite like this one for the design and composition but I'm not sure I ever found the right colour pallet. Maybe bright colours just wasn't the way to go in the first place. But as usual I have come to the conclusion that the weirder and gross looking the more fun I have drawing it. This secret 7 brief gave me a steep learning curve in the way I deal with the drawings I scan in. The colouring and texturing I do digitally can drastically effect the way the final piece works. I think working to such rough themes gave me time more just to figure out what it is that I want to draw. And it seems that weird and dark grungy things are my forte at this point. And i'm ok with that because I enjoy it a lot more and get a lot more satisfaction from it. This brief has taught me more about the way I work as an illustrator and the way I think than about working towards a professional brief.