I think this is the first post-work illustration that I hadn’t previously planned to draw prior to my retirement, and I enjoyed every part of researching and learning new techniques while putting it together bit by bit. Funnily enough, I didn’t originally plan to draw anything – I was just looking to buy a print of the four iconic intruments the Beatles played during their first U.S. visit in 1964. There are some prints out there, but some were inaccurate or too informal, while others weren’t as cleany presented as I wished – so the rest as they say is… well, this. 

I was going for a clean and technical but not necessarily photorealistic look. The visual references of the instruments I compiled came from many different online sources, so I knew one specific design challenge would be pulling off a consistent stylistic treatment across the set. Fortunately I found a great site called blueillustration.ca that sells fine art prints of some legendary guitars, with a clean consistent design direction that I was able to emulate for this piece. FWIW my drawing of John’s Rickenbacker (far left) is practically a carbon copy of Blue Illustration’s treatment, redrawn in Illustrator – so giving credit where credit is due!

Next up I’m planning to do a second piece based on this one, but as more of a “coloring book” treatment: black outlines with solid color fills, and likely more visual flourishes. This is the thing I love most about working in Illustrator: now that I’ve done the heavy lifting for this first piece all in vectors, I can riff on it endlessly in my subsequent designs. It dawned on me that it’s a bit like working in Blender in that regard, but for 2D instead of 3D.