De La Soul in Space!

For this project, I took this short piece by Alexis Petridis as inspiration - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/feb/13/a-new-style-of-speak-the-lyrical-genius-of-trugoy-the-dove.

Reading it, it struck me that De La Soul were pioneers, and coupled with the phrase “unlike any rap you or anyone else has ever heard”, as well as the mention of their music being "transmitted from Mars", it struck me that I could illustrate them as pioneering spacemen, floating above that planet.

After roughly sketching my idea out, using photos of the band and astronauts as references, I then used my iPad as a lightbox, laying real paper over it and drawing a slightly more refined version in pen. I didn't make it too refined as I think my style is best when there are some loose lines in there. This drawing was then scanned and saved as a .png file, with the background removed. This meant that it would just be the lines and nothing else, meaning I could recolour them in Procreate. You'll notice I deliberately left some marks in. I like my digital work to give clues to its analog origins, so always leave at least some noisy areas.

As you can see, I recoloured the pen lines, added some colour details on their suits, and then a home-made digital texture to their faces (this is made using grey tones turned to bitmaps). I then started experimenting with backgrounds.

In the above two images you can see I moved MC Posdnuos further up towards the top left corner. This is because I felt there was too much visual weight across the centre of the image, and more than enough at the bottom. In fact, I wasn't happy with this composition. It was almost there but that planet dominated the image too much. I went to bed to sleep on it. The following morning, I woke up at 5am and knew what to do, so half an hour later I finally gave in, got up and started working. I printed out the drawing of the band so far (without the background), and started sketching until I came up with this.

I knew at this point that I had it. The planet looked better in the middle to help tie the three astronauts together, and the spaceship and yogurt pot (another reference to the initial article) gave me five main objects floating in space, with lots of triangulation throughout the image. The floating blobs of yogurt are also a little reference to Marcos's finished piece in this course.

Things moved pretty quickly at this point. Refined versions of the yogurt and spaceship were drawn (the spaceship inspired by illustrations by Émile-Antoine Bayard from Jules Verne's Around The Moon, published in 1870) and coloured in line with the rest of the piece, and a pre-prepared texture was adding to give us the planet's surface. I also recoloured all of the line work to give it a slightly more vintage look.

After adding another texture onto the yogurt, I moved a couple of the blobs to the front to give the piece further depth. At this point I revisited the original background of hatched lines and stars, and decided they worked well. I adjusted the stars so they were almost the same grey as the lines, but not quite (I thought white was too bright and distracting). And that was that. This piece was created at A3 size, so I have the option of printing posters.

NB: I really enjoyed this course - thanks Marcos!