As promised, here are the SHOP sketches for the next cover.
The Naples brief was probably my favorite one from the get-go.
The theme for this luxury guide was all about luxury Italian silk scarves and the many different ways you can wear them.
As I was researching designer scarves patterns to draw inspiration from, I found that amazing image of the woman laying down on top of those incredible scarves, creating a patterned floor behind her. I felt that the idea of drawing a woman in scarves could be a great way to show the garnment as an organic thing, almost alive and taking over the body itself.
So I created some simple composition patterns to show the client, knowing that they would need to be developed in a much more complex and interesting way once the overall layout was approved. Those patterns were going to take some time for sure…
The client loved the second approach with the girl looking straight at us so I went away and developed the scarf pattern and refined the drawing.
At this stage we were almost there and the client was happy but I felt that the scarf was probably too discreet here and was fighting with the girl too much, leaving the viewer a bit unsure of what they were looking at so I decided to go for it and hide the woman inside the pattern itself, like the reference image I loved so much.
It worked and I think that extra step was really worth it. So far this is my favorite SHOP cover.
Malika x
