Responsive - Secret 7"

My chosen song for Secret 7" is Let Forever Be by The Chemical Brothers. I read the lyrics of the song and thought that it sounds like the singer is communicating what seems to be a psychedelic experience. The music video is also quite similar in nature, but obviously I don't want to derive too much from it.

In light of this, I've decided that I want the image to have a psychedelic nature, using the motif of a hand.

 

I want a trippy looking hand with too many fingers and nice texture, so I did the shape of it in gouache and then scanned it in and added details digitally - but I find it really difficult to get a smooth application of gouache on paper and it just makes the skin look like it's been burnt as can be seen on the above images.

Coloured pencil tests:

Really liked the coloured pencil on paper, especially on the last image, but scanned in it looks too rough and grainy - I don't want to battle with making my work look as nice on screen as it does off, though I think with the last image I have the basis for my digital illustration.

I looked at psychedelic posters from the 60s, particularly those by Victor Moscoso in order to gain inspiration for the colour and motifs of my final design - swirling shapes and more strict colour used encouraged me to make the spiral pattern background design and use the bright colour scheme.

Final illustration:

I think the hand trails are subtle, yet useful enough to give the hand a glow and not make it seem too "plastered" in the image. I also think it was a smart move to not use as many colours for the final design as I did when using coloured pencils. This not only makes the final design neater and more subdued, but also is more inline with actual psychedelic designs which had limited colour palettes.