"Everyone deserves the chance to fly!"
With the upcoming release of the movie, Wicked: For Good, I was inspired to choose a character from the first movie, Wicked, as my subject. However, I was stuck at a crossroads of whether to choose Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba or Ariana Grande as Glinda. Both characters were equally important in the story, and it was difficult to choose one over the other.
Thus, I decided to choose my subject based on which song I decided to create the portrait with, which led me to ultimately choose Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba as my subject. If you haven’t already guessed which song I chose, it was Defying Gravity. I felt this was the most impactful and recognizable song of Wicked (though this answer might change depending on who you ask), and it was the perfect song to create my portrait to which would be a fitting homage to the movie.
I wanted a reference image that separated Elphaba and Glinda clearly, so I chose a movie poster that places them on opposite sides with a bold, contrasting background. After finding a high-quality version of the poster, I converted it to greyscale to start the portrait.
I took the poster into Adobe Illustrator, where I used the pen tool to start outlining the contours on not only Elphaba’s face, but her signature hat and hair. To keep my work organized, I color-coded the outlines for distinct sections of the portrait.
By using a combination of the outline I made in the previous step and the text tool, I filled in the portrait with the lyrics of Defying Gravity, starting from the top of her hat and working my way down, section by section.
However, I ran into an issue quickly. The song was not nearly long enough to cover the entire portrait with text, so I chose to repeat the lyrics throughout the composition to ensure it was fully filled. Each time the song restarted, I added a “:||” symbol as a small nod to the text coming from a song, inspired by my experience playing piano, since this repeat sign is used in sheet music to mark the beginning of a repetition.
Once all the typography had been laid out and outlined, I began the shading process with the gradient and mask tool. Using the poster as a reference for the gradients, I took the portrait line by line, making sure the gradient being applied to the text was accurate to the source.
To add a little bit of Ozian flair to the portrait, I color-coded Elphaba’s hat between her and Glinda’s lines in the song. This was done to symbolize the hat coming from Glinda, so the hat was a combination of the two, with Elphaba’s lines being green and Glinda’s lines being pink.
From this portrait, I learned how much patience and intention go into creating a typographic illustration. Working with the lyrics, outlines, and gradients helped me understand how each piece of the process contributes to the final image.
In the future, if I were to add on to this project, I would create a portrait of Glinda using the song For Good from the second movie, Wicked: For Good. I think the two portraits would work well as a pair, since Defying Gravity and For Good are such pivotal songs in their respective movies and mirror the focus on Elphaba in the first movie and Glinda in the second.
