Print/Editorial. Cover sketches

I'm pretty set on featuring the gallery exhibition opening of Keith Haring in NYC as my cover story. This sort of opportunity is a rather rare occurence and as far as New York goes, Keith Haring was 'the last rockstar artist' (in the words of Laura :) and has been considered a legend in NYC since his death in 1990. So overall, I feel like it's an appropriate subject to headline a magazine that specializes in the 'To-Do's' of New York City.

If you are unfamiliar with his work, check it out. One of his trademarks is simple line drawings mostly of human-like characters arranged in playful, symbolic ways. I feel as though these characters could be interactive with the content of my magazine design and serve as a theme throughout the pages.

The following images contain sketches of my first few ideas for the cover image. At this point, I'm leaning towards using an actual photograph of his head/upper torso and exposing an open segment of his head, displaying:

1. an NYC wall/building/street scene displaying one of his famous graffiti works (or even actually having himself inside of his head creating one of his famous works on the 'wall of his mind')

or

2. a segment of his brain matter made up of one of his famous pattern works (he created several works which contain a certain degree of patternization. i.e., he would make a 'collage' of a bunch of those human like drawings)

The exposed 'inside the head' segment will most likely be illustrated.

The other alternative I've begun to develop you will see in the last image. Tried mixing elements of NYC that also relate to Haring....buildings, brick walls, typography, artistic elements of his work. If you look closely, you will find that the entire composition spells out: "Go inside the mind of Keith Haring"....obviously, I went a little crazy, the actual cover design would be much more organized, just trying to develop a set of elements that might work well together.