Adobe Honor Heroes
Progression GIF
Last spring, in the middle of the lockdown (at least in Barcelona where I live) and in a time where everyone was trying to adjust to the pandemic, I received a very interesting project request from Adobe.
They were teaming up with artists from around the world to create portraits of some of our everyday heroes who were still out working, trying to make things easier for the rest of us. A beautiful project that I absolutely wanted to be a part of.
The brief was very simple. Create a portrait of someone you know/someone in your community that you want to honor.
I made a list of some of the people around me and after talking to it with the Adobe team we picked my friend Gabriella, a chemist PhD student (now doctor!) who together with the other people in her lab had taken a break from their normal projects to create hand sanitizers for some of the local elderly homes and hospitals.
A perfect person to portray. Not only did Gabriella do a fantastic work, she’s also one of my oldest friends and in a time of being physically secluded from the world it meant a lot to me to look at photos of her and dig into our past experiences together.
Gabbi and me at Hultsfred music festival in 2005.
The two of us met the second day in our new upper secondary school where we attended the same art program. We became part of a weird, nerdy and lovely group of friends who spent the most of our time together. We went to concerts, exhibitions and escaped to music festivals during the summers. We traveled around Europe by train (trying to survive on as little money as possible) and tried to navigate through the teenage and young adult years together. We studied, worked and tried to explore the world together when it was possible.
Gabbi actually studied and worked as a scenographer for many years, working on big film productions like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series before deciding that she wanted to pursue her other passion, chemistry.
Initial sketches of Gabriella in her chemist glasses and clothes.
My process was my usual one for portraits. Meaning I started with gathering a lot of photos of her and then start on some rough sketches to try to get her facial features right.
After that I start adding colours, refine the shapes and think about potential other elements. In this project I needed to add some type as well so I thought about what kind of lettering would work best with this image. I really liked the loose hand written type in the third version below, but in the end it didn’t work with all the texts and the other elements.
You can see pretty clearly in how her clothes and other objects are being developed from step to step.
Her lab coat was initially much mor realistic but I felt like it took up too much space and took focus from her face so I adjusted it so that you later only see the highlight on her shoulder and collar.
I knew that I wanted to add some molecules in the background to connect it to her specific contribution, but in the first tests I only added some spheres to the layout to get a feeling for how it might feel, in the final one you can see that the shapes has been modified to better mimic the shape of the molecule for the hand sanitizer, but with a touch of creative freedom;)
