The figure itself is taken from this photograph which was drawn and coloured in photoshop. The lettering (all Gainsbourg compositions) is all hand-drawn. I thought that it would be interesting to show the various stages behind the creation of the text jacket.
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I decided that it would be too labour intensive to use my Bamboo tablet to draw the text. So I printed the basic shape of the jacket onto A4 and the traced the outline on to layout paper. I added the lettering quite loosely and then began to ink.
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It quickly became apparent that working at A4 was very restrictive, even with a 0.25 pen and my choice of using layout paper was a mistake as it soaked up the ink. You can see, in the bottom left hand corner, an ever growing list of song titles that I was dissatisfied with and had noted for later retouching. Despite these problems I soldiered on as I wanted to take a break from the computer and try and tackle a project with pen & paper.
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My eagerness to include all of my favorite songs led to the very squashed text on the shoulders of the jacket, making the whole thing look uneven. To eliminate this I would have to go into photoshop and reconstruct the layout. This turned out to be immensely liberating and the final jacket, after intensive copying, pasting, re-sizing and re-touching and a lot of re-drawn text, is very different to the pen version above.
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Overall a very enjoyable project with some important lessons to be learnt along the way. Add to that the fact that I worked exclusively to a Gainsbourg soundtrack I'm already hatching ideas for my next Draw Serge submission.
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