ILLUS5020: pop culture pins research

I always like to start off my blogs with an image and this is the image that will set off the little rabbit hole I went down to reach the conclusion I have for my pin brief. The pop culture icon I went for was K.K. Slider from the Animal Crossing series. As overrated as it may possibly be, Animal Crossing has helped me through some really tough times this year and I wanted to honour it in some way or another. I'm not really one for doing 'fanart' or fan pieces in any capacity usually however. I try not to out of my own stubbornness I guess. Artists like myself that try and be active on social media and work mainly digitally often are forced into a fate of doing fanart and fanworks to make due, I'm trying to avoid that in any way possible. But it did feel like a rare little treat to be able to draw a character I love from a series I love. 

If you somehow don't know, K.K. Slider is an in-game character that also happens to be a musician in the animal crossing series, I wasn't initially going to focus on him but rather my favourite 'villagers' from the game. But the more I looked into it, the more I realised many and I mean many had done it long before I had. K.K. to a degree had been done a lot before as well but I felt he was the one with the most potential to make something new and fun with because of his repertoire of interesting faces, poses, songs etc. Basic white dog design besides. I knew I could work with a particular feature/features of his that could make my idea stand out and different from the infinite other cutesy K.K. designs. 

It was then I had a sort of epiphany of sorts, you see the very first image is a sort of meme amongst people Animal Crossing players, when K.K. sings sometimes he pulls this sort of cheesy grin and people have noted how sort of... uncanny it looks on his dead eyed face with his stoic eyebrows. With that in mind I took more of a look into the album covers which are drawn by a variety of artists I presume for the game. Each one is unique in some way and I knew that that point I could definitely roll with an idea to combine K.K's cheeky grin and his music.