Okay, bear with me here: a year and change ago, I published an illustration I made of the four iconic instruments the Beatles played during their first US Tour in 1964. For the original piece I was going for a clean and technical representative look, not literally photorealistic, but with gradients, shadows, etc. At that time, I also expressed my interest in repurposing elements of the same piece, but in more of a graphical “comic book” style: crisp outlines, less realistic flat colors and with some visual flourishes in the background. And then 13 months passed. Ha!  

In hindsight, I realized that my creative bottleneck was the “visual flourishes” part: I knew I wanted to add some background elements, but I didn’t have a specific approach in mind, so it languished. I recently revisited VectorStock, a fantastic royalty-free graphics site I first discovered back at Microsoft, where time and again it was an lifesaver for grabbing quick images for demos and prototypes. Unsurprisingly, they had literally thousands (maybe even tens of thousands!) of ornamental graphics and background elements to browse and choose from. I found plenty of suitable examples that fit the vibe I was looking for, and here’s what I came up with for my first experimental pass. 

There’s still plenty of work to do. I started with George Harrison’s Gretsch, but I still have the other three Beatles’ instruments on tap. And while this treatment is aligned with my vision for how the final piece (or pieces) should look, I do absolutely intend to draw my own backgrounds for the final versions, as opposed to licensing them. But big props to VectorStock’s amazing library of images for helping me get over the creative hump.