Medusa Book Illustration

Tasked with choosing any free use media, we had to choose a story to create book covers and interior illustration concepts

Media: Procreate (Digital)
Size: 18x11"

Inspired by the depiction of Medusa by roman poet Ovid, I wanted to explore this other version of Medusa as a sexual assault survivor and who she was as a person before being cursed and turned into the "monster" we all know her as. I experimented with different line weights and leaned into a more comic book inspired style, which I really love, and I played around with color saturation.

I collaged together multiple images to help create the background, pushing that ancient Greek architecture to make the character feel like she is from that era. Along with the background being period accurate, I pulled together multiple period specific clothing for Medusa to wear. I kept her clothes layered and loose as was depicted for that era in Greece.

In this piece I also alluded to her fate with the gold snake hair pin and with her green color pallet, using the green to symbolize the deceit and envy that Athena feels about her, leading her to be cursed.

In my piece with Medusa sitting in her overgrown garden. Her color pallet is desaturated to symbolize her changes, both physically and emotionally. For the snakes I chose to illustrate Medusa with banana ball pythons for two reasons. 1) To keep the imagery of her blonde flowy hair 2) ball pythons are very docile and kind creatures and I wanted to use that to hint back to Medusa's pervious personality before she got cursed. It contrasts to her new appearance and personality.

The book cover depicts Medusa split with the left side being her human appearance and the right side being her gorgon appearance. I added gold foil embellishing to the top corner of the book and for the title of the book as well. The designs on the top corners are snakes intertwined together. I wanted to stick with snakes when designing the small icons for the cover to still connect to the story.