This is a personal project, a panoramic digital illustration for social media profile covers.
I intended to communicate the other side of the beautiful images of success and happiness that people like to post on their social profiles. I find it an interesting phenomenon when a person fills their social media with clean and filtered images of what seems to be careless glamorous life causing envy among their audience. But what they show does not always correspond to what they really have around and feel inside. One can seem chilling at a private pool in full harmony with oneself but at the same time feel terrible or have a lot of large-scale problems that cannot be shown to or seen by strangers. I wanted to include this connotation delicately and depicted that negative part of the concept as a large dark cloud instead of the woman's head shadow.
As a result, the impression the illustration gives depends on the cropping. It can be cropped leaving out the massive head shadow and will seem positive, glamorous and maybe shallow:
Or the shadow can be the main hero, with most of the pool cropped off, and in this case, the impression is uneasy and mystifying.
The uncropped "big picture" version is like a metaphor of real life consisting of both sad and happy aspects.
The sketch and color swatches:
