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Audrey

Elegance is the only beauty that never fades.

Audrey Hepburn is one of my all-time favorite people. I am hugely inspired by her in too many ways to explain. While she is most often remembered for her beauty and acting career, she was also an avid humanitarian and a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. Beauty, brains, and compassion.

Because she is such an inspiration to me, I chose to sketch her for one of my earliest graphic design projects in ART109. The entire process probably took me 20 hours, but I wanted to do her justice. I started with an image readily available on Google that showed the angles and shading to her face. I posterized and cropped the image in Photoshop to make the shading more obvious, before starting the real work of tracing and layering the outlines of her face in Illustrator.

This is one of the few projects I completed at UM where I felt truly limited by the constraints of the project. We had to create a custom background pattern as well as include a famous quote from the person we chose. I wanted to go with a jewel or diamond-like pattern, but it ended up looking a little too busy once I added the quote too. I also dislike that I had to choose a shorter quote (for space reasons) because her shorter quotes are rather shallow and do not adequately represent who Audrey Hepburn was as a person. As you can see, I also kind of messed up the shading in her neck, but later went back to fix my mistakes.

If I had more space, I would have chosen one of the following quotes instead:

For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.

or

As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

Because Audrey Hepburn was an absolutely beautiful soul, both gorgeous in appearance and compassionate in practice. Elegant and remembered even years after her death.

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