Female empowerment artwork is missing something these days. It seems that there is little originality anymore within design and it is more about just vivid colors or elongated shapes, rather than actual uniqueness and emotion with a message behind it. The same can not be said for masculine artwork in my opinion, as both the video game industry and work you see in action movie posters, are top notch. However, I still feel the best decade for the latter type of artwork is behind us and one can look at some of the Metal Gear Solid artwork from past games to see what I mean.
Thus, recently I have been creating digital illustration and photo manipulations that turned into original graphic designs based on both themes. This is due to the recent news that Adobe Illustrator hit the iPad and me wanting to experiment with the pen tool on the iPad. I also wanted to get a feel of transferring working PSD and AI files across the cloud, apps and even devices.
However, sketching or illustraring humans has never been easy for me. It is often subjective and nuanced based on actions or even what a person is holding in his or her hand thst can prove challenging. There are also many styles to choose from when engaging in such a task that include realistic, surreal or cartoon-like, which is very popular these days, but I am not a big fan of.
Sketching humans is also challenging when trying to convey emotion onto the work to have the viewers or audience be able to draw from. A lot of my work is coincidental in nature, or. Just work based off an idea and see what I can come up with, but nothing is set to stone ahead of time. When something interesting pops in my head I enjoy to see what transpires out of me just designing what I feel in the moment.
Sometimes the most interesting stuff is sontaneous and not pre-planned ahead of time. I also enjoy reusing some of my assets in new ways by putting previously-created assets or character and combining them in interesting ways and forming new designs out of my assets.
Thus, to practice the use of Adobe Illustrator on the iPad and its pen tool, I took a previously-created digital illustration of a woman that I created using Procreate on the iPad. You can check out two versions of it below:
I sketched this on iPad 
I sketched this on iPad
I then used Artstudio Pro on the iPad to add a background and other elements to it and revised some aspects of it such as the medical instrument that is in one of the pockets (the original idea was to draw a female doctor or a female physician):
As you may have guessed if you read my last blog post, I reused my last Stegna, coastal Polish town, illustration I did using Procreate on the iPad as the backdrop. The way I did it was duplicate the illustration and mirror it for symmetry then add some effects such as noise or a monochrome design depending on version you see above.
I also have had some widescreen images that I plan to use as hero or feature images, if nothing else maybe widescreen logos, for WordPress, with women doing a variety of things to showcase the female form and power behind it. However, they are still a work in progress.
The version of the female holding the pen and pad above is one of the forms. Here are the others (have been in the Illustrations page for a while) and I will update this blog post and the Illustrations page as I keep updsting these designs:
I have a version almost complete on my Macbook’s Photoshop (see first version above as an early progress) with only one pair of shoes to complete and another version on Illustrator I should have complete soon. Look for both these versions soon possibly on the bottom of this page and within the Artwork & Illustrations page.
In a way the theme can be summarized as female empowerment or feminism as the women are doing a wide range of tasks or participating in often male oriented jobs and careers within the images.
When looking at the women above engage in these various roles, it may seem confusing but I got the ideas for these roles from a client who is starting a female empowerment type or a business and needed a website done I am helping her with. The overall theme can be summarized as female empowerment, or feminism in a nutshell, as the women are doing a wide range of tasks or participating in often male oriented jobs and careers within the images.
Here are some other design ideas I have created from some of these forms:
As I mentioned above, I am currently working on finishing one pair of shoes on the middle image above so expect to see it soon. Keep checking in toward the bottom of this post or the top of it to see new versions or variants of any images you see on the site. Also keep checking the Artwork and Graphic Design pages.
I also previously mentioned how I have been working on some masculine artwork. I have been doing this due to my interest in photography and photo manipulations. I really like to desaturate images to redo or completely recolour them or even draw over them and add to them with the various brushes on apps such as Photoshop or Procreate to completely transform images into new designs.
The photograph you see was twken of me by a gym I go to where I train a wrestling class. Thus, for fun I decided to play with the design I was in to see what I could come up with.
The gloves are entirely self created and digital and I have added some other small effects such as a mirror face and two faces of the same person for a bit of fun:
Here are my surreal and digital versions with lots of touching up and even adding morphed body parts due to the effects such as invert or posterize merging them.
Redesigned the image above to have one of the women hold a laptop and not just a notepad amongst some other fosmetic changes:
Here is the latest work in progress via Photoshop of the landscape female athletes and professionals design:
Below are some more masculine design I have recently using my previous in unique ways to create new scenes. Notice how some of them break the fourth wall so to speak:
Maciej Duraj 
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