Glasgow-based polygon artist Suzanne Waters creates these amazingly detailed portraits by hand
Describing herself as a 'pint-sized multi-disciplined graphic designer' Suzanne Waters recently landed a commission from Warner Music and Rocket Management to create a painstakingly detailed illustration of Ed Sheeran for a new range of merchandise designs for his epic three nights at Wembley Stadium.
From afar it might be easy to assume that Suzanne's designs are app-made, but these beautiful designs can take up to 15 hours for her to produce, polygon-by-polygon. So we selected our favourite music-related pieces and asked Suzanne to set the record straight and tell us all about how she struck gold with such incredible polygon art.
'It all started by wanting to give my brother an unusual gift and decided on doing a portrait of his dog, Maggie,' she told us. 'I didn't want to just give him a sketch as he's always been drawn to the more abstract images and I had seen a few examples of polygon art and liked it so decided to give it a go. That first sketch took me about 20 hours to finish but worth it when I saw his face when he got the gift!'
Inspired by the positive reaction, Suzanne began to develop her style by illustrating icons from music and film.
'I start by sketching where the main parts of the face are, so outline the face shape, eyes, nose and mouth in Illustrator using the original as a guide. Then I start filling in the more detailed parts by drawing triangles, the smaller the triangles the more detail I get, and just work outwards from there.'
'I use a Wacom pen and tablet and Illustrator to draw each triangle by hand, then colour it up there as well using a colour palette I've made up, either realistic skin tones or going quite abstract. Each portrait takes anywhere from 8-15 hours to do from start to finish, depending on how much detail I want to get. I've learned to not blink a lot since starting doing these!'
I draw each triangle by hand
'Warner Music replied to my interest in working on the Ed Sheeran shirt design after seeing my work on CC and Twitter. They gave me a selection of images they wanted to use and asked me to come up with a design in my style with any image that I felt worked best. I really liked the idea of pushing myself to get as photo-realistic as I could, so the image showing off his tattoos and guitar I thought would be the best one to go for. I did a few versions: full colour, abstract colours and just the wireframe, and then waited with bated breath to see if they were happy with them.'
Which of Suzanne's designs are her favourite and which designer does she love?
'I'd say my favourite is still Josh Homme as I'm a huge fan and wanted to get his personality across in as few triangles as I could, making it more abstract than my usual prints. Closely followed by my Dolly Parton print, I hadn't done many female portraits and Dolly turned out better than I had expected as I was working from a grainy black and white image. I most admire Olly Moss, I think his alternative movie posters and paper cut prints are things of utter beauty. If I was to work with my dream artist (other than Josh Homme!) it would be Tyler the Creator. He has got such an expressive face and I think an abstract of him would work brilliantly.'
