Illustrator, 1h.
I decided to fool around again with the “big swooshy line with a parallel line brush” technique I played with yesterday.
I’d drawn this big swoosh in the same file before I closed it yesterday. I duplicated it and started fooling around – I rotated it, stuffed it in a distortion mesh, rotated the mesh back, and made two new mesh lines close together in the middle, then pulled it apart. And made a bunch more mesh lines to let me wave it around.
It looked vaguely like a figure so I added a few more mesh lines to make a rectangle around the head area, and another mesh line down the middle of that area to create some points to pull around.
The parts coming up and around kinda felt like a hand holding something, so I drew a stylized post-horn and some hands.
I really wanted this to just be B&W but I was lazy and used a second color to knock that hand back. Then it started to look like an old super-designey Penguin Books cover so I looked online for the grid they structured everything around for a few decades, dropped it in, and moved things around until it looked good.
And then I rendered it out and posted it and now you are looking at it.
If you got this far down maybe you would like to support my patreon if you’re not doing that already and have more money than you know what to do with.