I felt using a pop art theme and re-working/re-cycling images is a well considered design route. I want to celebrate Amy as an image of positivity rather than focusing on the darker elements of her history and death.
In order to do so I wanted to take an image of her and use bold colours and illustrative style to bring it into a more positive light - a celebration of her life and achievements rather than focus on the negative.
My initial design experiment was based upon Amy's hair - for which she was iconically known for, it was her entire image. I used a digital drawing tablet to create this rough design as a start point for a pop art interpretation of her as a musical artist.
I developed this simple iconic image into something that looked 'stamped'. This was informed by the elements of danger within her life that could be reflected in this design style.
I tried various edits of this design to bring it to life a little more and make it iconic of both her and her reality - but keeping the positive theme in mind.
I added bright bold colours to try add the pop art positive re-working style to the design. I felt in the end it wasn't obvious enough to me that the context of the design was Amy Winehouse and it didn't portray positivity well enough. I wanted to create something much bolder and clearly a celebration of her and her life achievements within the design.
I decided a more appropriate route would be to actually re-work a photograph of Amy Winehouse. In a similar middle ground style between Warhol and Hattie Steward. I chose this image as the base for the design as it's a snapshot of Amy before her career took off and before her troubles with drink and drugs started - I felt this was appropriate in celebrating a positive time in her life well.
I began in Illustrator outlining the key features within the image to make them bold and to be sure the underlying message was clear - and so you could fundamentally tell it was her.
I began by adding bold flat colours to the design - in a hand rendered design style to show a personal element to the design. Being hand rendered gives a heartfelt touch to the design representative of it's sensitive nature.
This is the final edit of the photograph, the original version can only be seen very slightly underneath the illustrative overlay. Informed by the re-working style of pop art I used bold colours of positivity and happiness to bring the image to life. For the background I created a confetti inspired illustrative pattern. The pattern gives the design a clear boldness - it's iconic of Amy's party lifestyle and does so in a positive way. The illustrative nature is informed by the sensitive and personal story behind the design.
I developed the design further by incorporating it into a Polaroid format. I feel a Polaroid snapshot is very iconic of a small snapshot into a previous time - I wanted to represent the past and that small space in time before her fame where things were good - that's the time in her life she should be remembered for and celebrated in a positive light.
This image shows the final design in context. I feel it is bold and represents positivity well. The whole idea behind the final design is that it shows a brief snapshot in time of when her life was full of positivity - representing her and her talent before the drug issues and tragedy that followed. Colour theory played a huge part in transforming the image from something that portrayed and represented a sad memory to now being full of life and happiness through illustrative expression.
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