Bygone Badass Broads cover, Abram’s Books

I’ve been wanting to dive a little bit deeper into some of the client projects I’ve been working on over the years and thought that a good place to start would be with my first big project.

I started freelancing full time in September 2016. At that time I mostly did smaller editorial projects and focused a lot of my free time on developing my portfolio. I had mainly been focusing on portraits of women as I felt inspired by it and loved playing around with ways of incorporating patterns and colors into clothes and accessories and because of this, most of my commercial projects was also on this topic.

In early 2017 I got a request by Abram’s Books who wanted to know if I would be interested in working on a big series of portraits to a book called Bygone Badass Broads - 52 Forgotten Women Who Changed the World. A dream project for someone like me who not only loved drawing faces but also really wanted to be a part of putting the stories of women into the light and make female history more visible.

As you probably understand from the title, the book includes the stories about 52 incredibly interesting women (scientists, artists, queens, warriors, pirates, writers, activists and more), written in a smart and witty style by author Mackenzi Lee. Each mini biography needed it’s own portrait and there where only 3 months to work on it which meant that the project pace was really high, but as this was my first big project I mostly felt excited about finally getting the chance to dig deep and develop a whole series of artworks.

The kind of research I do for client projects vary a lot depending on the theme. Sometimes I don’t really do any research at all, I just base the image on the ideas/feelings I get when reading the brief, but other times, like this, quite a lot of research is needed. Thankfully in this case Mackenzi had mostly finished the biographies so I started each portrait with reading them, and then I would start digging around the internet for visual information. The kind of research varied a lot though, since the book starts with Empress Xi Ling Shi who lived around the time of 2700 BCE in China, there obviously aren’t any photographs of her, however her story is mostly about her invention of silk so my visual research came to be about that. How does a silk worm look? And what about the mulberry tree where the worms live?

For other portraits later in history there where photos, so there my job was about collecting a series of photos, study them and try to find the specific characteristics in the face to make the person recognizable.

To connect each image to the story I also tried to add some other element to the image that would tie in with their life stories. One example of this is in the portrait of physician Emmy Noether. Einstein called her the most significant and creative woman in mathematics, and she managed to reach that level in the late 19th century when it was still almost impossible for women to get the chance to study at all!

So for her image I wanted to add in elements from her world, some of them in ways that would stand out a lot, floating around her, but also small + signs on her bow as a hidden gem.

The last image I want to dig into in this post is one of the last ones I did for the book. It’s the image of activist Azucena Villaflor. During a state of political upheaval in Argentina, the military government abducted, tortured and killed everyone who openly opposed them. The kidnapped where referred to as the “disappeared” even though everyon know what had happened to them.

Nestor, Azucena’s son, was one of the rebells who had been arrested and then disappeared and Azucena started making inquiries to find out what had happened to him. She asked and asked but didn’t get any answers. Instead of giving up she organized a protest of mothers of disappeared children outside the government offices.

At first, only a small group of mothers showed up, but the movement grew steadily and more and more joined the protests. The symbol of the protest became the white head scarves the mothers wore when they marched, sometimes with names of their disappeared children.

In December 1977 the mothers published a list of the names of all their missing children. Soon thereafter Azucena herself disappeared and was later found dead, but sha had started a movement that still lives today and fight for human, political and civil rights.

With this illustration it was important for me to make it feel powerful. To focus on the force of these women and the energy they brought into the world. I wanted to put Azucena in the centre but surround her by the scarves of other women joinging her in this movement.

Bygone Badass Broads

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