Artwork I created for Jimmy Harwood’s EP ‘Choose Your Colour‘. Jimmy asked me if I could draw him in the center of the image with an enlarged head, and have crazy psychedelic colours shooting out of it. This was a really fun project because I love bold colours and lots of visual complexity, but really tried hard to make the final image not too chaotic.
- Client & Art Direction : Jimmy Harwood
- Roll : Illustration/Logo Design/Packaging/Video Production
Front and back cover.
Making-of Video!
Process Sketches
So how big do you want your head to be exactly? Jimmy provided a reference image of himself playing guitar for me to work from.
I loved the colours shooting out of his head and the colour scheme we went with (#4, the bottom left thumbnail in the image above) but wanted to place the character in some sort environment.
I thought having Jimmy float over a green lake would be awesome, levitating through the power of music. I introduced the green mountains in the background to try and give it some more atmosphere.
I’d gotten to a point where I loved all the elements (the crystal-like mountains, the lake, the bubbles, the yellow sun) but it was too much of an assault on your eyes. There’s just too much going on, you don’t know where to look, and it’s kind of taxing on your eyes I felt. I needed to find a way to salvage this thing.
Final
I found if I made the background mountains red and took away the yellow sun then the piece settled down quite a bit. An acceptable level of visual chaos.