Meditating Dolls!

Well, after a month off from bootcamp, it was great to be back with Lilla's lovely May Assignment.  The brief was to do an Editorial Illustration for a magazine article titled "How to Meditate: A Primer for People Who Don't Like to Meditate".  The mini was to draw faces and people.  To make it easy for us, instead of drawing real people, Lilla had us drawing dolls from her weird and wonderful collection.  Here's a page of my rough drawings of some of Lilla's dolls and others found on Pinterest.

We were also encouraged to go the art shop and buy some new materials or papers that we haven't used before. (LOVE shopping for art materials, any excuse!)  I found a lovely little book of coloured papers and painted some of my doll faces onto the coloured backgrounds, eyes closed to look like they were meditating.

The main point in the article I wanted to illustrate, is how when you're a beginner to meditation, your head is filled with random thoughts and it's difficult to clear your mind.  I wanted to illustrate a beginner meditating with all the everyday thoughts and intrusions in her mind, and a more experienced meditator, her mind clear and feeling nothing but peace and tranquility. 

I hope I achieved this in my illustration.  After many different compositions and colour palettes, this is my final design, helped along by Lilla's blue colour inspiration. I have discovered this month that editorial is pretty hard.  Still not sure this is entirely suited to editorial,  I wanted to do something really simple and graphic, but it didn't turn out like that.  I really enjoyed the challenge though!

You can check out all the wonderful designs by my fellow bootcamp artists in this months gallery by clicking here.