ILLUS5020: K.K. Grin Pin

So my idea was to combine K.K.'s glorious smile with his album covers in some way or another, that was my final conclusion to my research, but while I did my research I was producing other sketches and ideas as well, some of which ended up being in the final designs I went for. 

You can kind of see where I was starting to formulate some ideas with K.K. I was running with different aspects of his design that I wanted to emphasise for my pins. One was his grin and the other was his eyebrows (god i love his eyebrows, impeccable character design 11/10) His character is actually very hard to work with, at least to make something unique and not something that was officially licensed and shipped off by Nintendo themselves. It's most likely due to his very basic white design. 

At this point I had my epiphany and decided what exactly I wanted to work with, K.K.'s album covers. I wasn't sure how I was going to make it work so I at first decided just to sketch some of them and try and understand how I could make them into pins in some way. I also had to remember that they should all be uniform in some way or another whereas K.K. Slider's album covers come in all sorts of styles and designs and each one is vastly different from the last. It all depends on what genre or idea the song is going with. There are songs like Comrade K.K. (communism propaganda, I swear) to Surfin K.K a 60s sounding surf song, K.K. Technopop, Stale Cupcakes, a sort of lullaby type song and many, many more that have accumulated over the years. I was somehow going to decide on how I was going to unify his many genres. 

You can see how I was sort of bringing my ideas together at this point, refining them slightly. I kind of knew in my head what I was going to do. I was going to combine the drawing of K.K. grinning I did earlier with certain K.K. album covers, it was genius, I thought at the time. And so I started some mockups. I made a few based off various album covers where K.K. was seen thematically in a genre or stylistically interesting and I rolled with it. I decided on the final three and then simply made them ! 

I had achieved uniformity but perhaps to too much of a degree?? I'm not sure... I attempted to make each one unique in some way while also heavily sticking to my theme, I'm very happy with how they came out in the end! I possibly should have done more mockups of how they would look as pins rather than as vector images and perhaps that is something I will look into doing at a later date. For now, K.K. keeps grinning.