Mall Drawings

I am posting on a tuesday today. Delayed posting because I decided I wanted to pre-empt the next piece I've made for the project I do with http://laurenkolm.blogspot.com/. Without getting too specific before the full post, it was a reportage project. I drew at the mall. Quite a lot of my fellow illustrators at Washington University did reportage drawing at the St. Louis Galleria. I didn't until this summer when Lauren Kolm made me.

Anyway. After plenty of on site drawing I decided on a specific idea for an illustration. I needed to draw portraits of real people I saw in the mall. For the final to work as I envisioned I ended up working largely from photographs, making some formal changes where needed. Here are studies for some of the portraits.

I love how much character this guy had just in his goatee.

And here are the watercolors that I did over these pencils. These eventually make their way into the final illustration. For the most part my color strategy was to try to remain as true to life as possible while for the sake of the final piece keeping the colors mostly muted. At the same time it was important to try to preserve the attitude and character of each person through color decisions.