Illustration Friday - Cocoon

It's hard to believe that another Friday has rolled around.  This week's word for the Illustration Friday challenge is cocoon.  Of course my first thought was to do something with a butterfly.  I thought I could do something unusual by showing what happens inside the cocoon while the transformation is taking place. Maybe a caterpillar knitting her wings or maybe cozily curled up reading a book while she waits for her wings to grow.  But then, while looking at a book put out by Taschen called "Future Perfect, Vintage Futuristic Graphics," and getting excited by all of the unusual gadgets, machines and visions of what we used to think the future would look like, I decided to take the challenge in a whole other direction. My idea was to create a faux vintage magazine cover, a cover similar in style to those that use to grace "Popular Science" or "Science and Mechanics," in the days when they had great painted cover illustrations that depicted the wonders of the future. So to tie this in with the cocoon challenge, I decided to have the cover illustration of my faux magazine be a human cocoon device for hibernating during long interplanetary space voyages.  I decided I would have a father showing off this device to his son to prepare him for their own voyage into outer space.

In painting it, I looked at a lot of old "Popular Science" covers and noticed that they used a lot of bright primary colors, so that is how I decided on my palette. The illustration was drawn and painted in Corel Painter 11.  After the illustration itself was finished, I opened it in Photoshop and applied a halftone filter to it.  I then added the magazine border and created the fake masthead.  I ran the whole image through some third party filters to give it the look of an aged printed image. I then created a fake mailing address label and as a tribute to my late father, I used his name on it. One of the last steps was to come up with the fake article titles.  I enjoyed doing that, but I probably could have come up with better ones, if I had thought about it a little longer.

Below, you can see my first digital sketch of the idea.  Next to it, on the right is the original Painter image before adding the type and applying the Photoshop filters to it.