The Selena Project.
I had the amazing opportunity to participate in a senior illustration project where I was assigned to make an eight-foot poster with my chosen color, amethyst, for the side of the Columbia College Student Center.
Come take a look through my process!
When I began this project I decided to focus on figure. I have taken many figure drawing classes, and I think the human body is beautiful and diverse. At first, I was really enjoying drawing dancers, adding butterflies to represent the dancer's beauty and elegance.
For my second page of thumbnails, I was focusing again on figure, adding in elements of nature.
For my last page of thumbnails, I wanted to experiment more with an outstretched figure to make use of the vertical layout of the poster. I also decided I wanted to make a nod to amethyst by including crystals.
In the end, I decided on Selena. I pulled out the final thumbnail for this piece and sketched out the figure in order to decide how I wanted the dress to flow and fit.
This is the final design of the dress I made edits to after printing out all of my thumbnails and sketches. I decided to move the stars on her dress up to the waistline to not only suit the figure, but also to create a more balanced composition.
Selena's name was an easy choice. Originally, my gut feeling was that her name would be Selene, but after some quick research I discovered that "Selena" means "moon goddess", and that was that. In these thumbnails I focused on perfecting my color palette for the illustration and get a better feeling for the end result.
And here she is!
Seeing it printed was amazing and made all that hard work feel so worth it :)