Roll with the Changes

The above image is a neat little look into my creative process.

I was recently approached to do a poster for an upcoming Monterey Bay Derby Dames bout. Their original artist had to back out last minute so time was a major factor. Like, they needed it yesterday level factor.

I was given a bunch of instructions on what to place in the poster and threw it all together for the first image, to see if they even liked what I could come up with. Basically I was asked for a Kong Island (but we don't see Kong) sacrifice of a referee, with tikis and torches and natives bowing to the sacrifice. And a Derby Girl statue.

The first image was well received. I was asked to add natives and some revisions to make the derby girl look more 'derby girl'. And the sun.

The art committee then decided against a referee sacrifice and that a lot of the other things were making the image too 'busy' and the concept convoluted (I agree 100%)

More suggestions were tossed around, but many of them suffered the same fate (they just served to muddy up the concept.) So things in the original concept that didn't translate or move the 'story' forward were tossed out, and I decided the Derby Girl should be more Tiki and less Easter Island (and more in tune with one overall Tiki theme.) The final image also has much better balance and more room to add text etc without taking away from the story the image tells, which is still pretty close to the original concept.

I also made one of the natives female. I don't know if you noticed, but the native on the left and the front right are the exact same drawing in the middle version, just flipped (hey, they have a deadline and I was trying to save time) but since they gave me more time for revisions I decided to differentiate them a bit further.

It is still not perfect (but will have to do given the time constraints.) I don't know yet if it will get the green light or if there is time to change anything if they don't like where it has landed, but I thought the stages in the process formed a nice visual evolution and would make a neat post on how an artist (me) works out through a piece.