My Process:

When reading the story of Chris Knight, one detail that stuck out to me was how he had only started growing a beard since being arrested. It was as if him growing his beard was a representation of him missing his life in the woods. That thought lead to me thinking of ways I could represent that relationship of his beard to the woods, and I came of this the concept of layers of leaves that form his beard. I was excited about the concept, but I felt like it needed more, so I decided to brainstorm some ideas of easter eggs I could disperse throughout the leaf beard. Some are smaller, simpler ideas, such as candy or the shelf mushrooms, but I also pulled inspiration from some specific anecdotes told either in the article or from additional research I did, such as a note that was left for him asking that he not break in or passports that he left when he had stolen someone’s backpacks. When I was brainstorming the concept, I hadn’t thought too much about the space above or below his beard; however, when I was making it in Illustrator realized I had more room to display some details above and below his head, so I thought it would be interesting to display is thin framed, gold glasses with a cracked lens just above his nose and an orange prison jumpsuit below the neck to represent that the beard is tied to his time in prison. 

While I only used one type of leaf in my sketches, I knew I wanted to use a variety of leaves with a variety of colors in my final version. To add some authenticity to the piece, I looked up the foliage that is common to the area of Maine that Chris resided in and traced the leaves of some of the plants that can be found in the area.  While I did like the look of the laid leaves, it felt a bit flat, so I decided to add a drop shadow affect to all the leaves and items in the beard to give it a “layered paper” look. Typically, when I do use a drop shadow, I blur it a bit to help spread the shadow and give it a more authentic look, but with this project and the flat color of the leaves, I thought it looked more in line with the tone of the piece to not blur the shadow. One issue I did run into was after a certain point, I wasn’t allowed to add a drop shadow anymore objects. While I couldn’t find an answer as to why, my assumption is that there is a limit to the number of times you can use the effect, so I created my own for the last few items by copying the item to a layer underneath, giving it a dark grey fill, shifting to slightly to the direction of the other drop shadows, and lowering the opacity. To make the objects that are scattered throughout the beard, they all consisted of a similar process: find a reference image online and bring it into Illustrator, trace them using a combination of the shape tools and the curvature pen tool, and selecting colors with tones that are both authentic to the item and cohesive to the tones of the nature in the beard. For items that had text, I looked through my available fonts and chose the ones that were as similar to the reference image as I could find and expanded the text once I ensured it was all correct. The crumpled paper texture over the note was a learning opportunity for me. I looked up a couple of different methods that could work, but the one that resonated the most with me was to use the “Draw Inside” function in a rectangle, place an image of a crumpled piece of paper over top the rectangle, and change the opacity lay to “Overlay.”

What I Learned: 

Overall, I’m really pleased with how this piece turned out. When it comes to graphic design, or in general really, I don’t consider myself particularly artistic. However, I do find it cathartic to occasionally make these more creative pieces. The author of the article did such a great job describing details from both Chris’ experiences as well as his own experiences with Chris that it was easy to visualize even some more particular details. My goal was to summarize Chris’ experience as best I could, and I think that my illustration achieves what I intended it to.