The Handmaid's Tale development

I have started creating my image for The Handmaid's Tale brief so I will do a walkthrough of my process here.

I wanted to keep within the same style as the ENO promotional posters we were given as examples. These posters keep a very simple and minimal design, so I decided to make a very simple and clean vector image as my piece of art that I can apply to all the different necessary formats.

Here I took a screenshot from one of the episodes of The Handmaid's Tale TV show and imported it into Adobe Illustrator. I traced around the outline of the woman using the pen tool.

I then had the simple outline of the woman and decided to use the Live paint bucket tool to fill in the woman, using the eye-dropper tool to pick out the exact colours from the reference image.

I liked how this looked but felt I could do a bit more detail, so I traced around some of the more complicated parts of the original image. This included the creases of the dress as well as the shadows and contours of her neck and face. 

I then used the eyedropper tool and the paint bucket to fill in the drawing with the colours from the reference image. The result of that is the image on the left, but I felt these colours didn't look very natural, so I adjusted the colours myself and the result of that is on the right. Whilst a little more visually interesting, I don't like the result. I feel it is a little too strange looking and makes the woman look old. The detail doesn't add anything more than the original drawing I made, so I decided not to use this version.

I came back to the original drawing I did, but added some gradients to the parts of the drawing instead of keeping the block colour, to add a little more dimension.

I then extended the woman's figure by creating the rest of the dress and adding some shadows for where the sleeves would be. By doing this, I am able to have more variation in my final prints. I could use just the headshot of the woman, I could use above her chest or I could use this (almost) full-body shot. I now have more flexibility to have interesting final designs.