I got an assignment last week to come up with a cover for our upcoming Summer Music Guide edition of ON magazine. It a challenge that comes up every year, and one that gets a little harder every year, as we don’t want to repeat ideas and there have been some good ones in past years. I’ve done a sunset landscape through the hole in a guitar and another staffer did a sandy beach scene with a bikinied guitar. After sleeping on the idea (one of the better ways I’ve found to come up with illustration ideas) I decided to construct a guitar out of flowers. Originally I wanted to make the guitar entirely out of dandelions, since they are ubiquitous and I didn’t think any one would mind if I “harvested” their little gold blooms from the side of the road or along a sidewalk. They also say “summer” to me in a way no other flower does.
I ran into a couple of snags with this idea, mainly it was hot the day I worked on my illustration, and the dandelions I picked mid-day were shriveled and dead when I had time to work on my illustration later in the afternoon. I went out to harvest more, but my prime picking location (beside The Seasons) had been mowed in the three hour window I had been out shooting something else. I picked as many as I could and headed to my back yard. I decided to work in my garden, because the dandelions are kind of cone shaped on the bottom where I’d plucked them off their stems and wobbled around when I put them on cardboard. With dirt, I could poke little holes in the ground and set them in there. I gathered some other plant materials, flattened a nice empty part of the garden (luckily, I haven’t gotten around to planting the beans) and drew my guitar.
Then I started filling in my outline with flowers. Turns out I didn’t have enough dandelions to fill out the whole guitar (a disappointment) so I ended up using these little seeds that the neighbor’s tree drops all over my yard instead. I used big flat leaves beside the dandelions to provide a good contrast so the shape of the guitar really popped out, then tried to make the background colorful.
Lastly, I stood on the edge of the raised bed and photographed my creation straight down. If I had to do it again, I’d figure out some way to keep the flowers fresher and work on it earlier in the day. Here’s the final image:
