Feb 29, 2012
Gioachino Rossini's 220th Birthday / Leap Year 2012
This Doodle’s Key Themes
Every so often two things happen on the same day that we'd be remiss not to celebrate. In the past there's been St. George's Day and Shakespeare's birthday in the UK, Fourth of July and Rube Goldberg's birthday in the US, and Valentine's Day/Figure skating for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
In this day's case, it's the 220th birthday of Italian composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini and leap year. (Or, if you're only counting actually leap day's for birthdays it's something like Gioachino's 53rd.)
At any count, in the grand tradition of opera singing cartoons, I created an illustration that captures the climatic scene of Rossini's most famous work, The Barber of Seville, as portrayed by a cast of goofy-looking frogs.
A couple of process tidbits... the original frog opera design was going to be much more complicated:
I got really into the chair design for some reason.
A couple of hours into watching The Barber of Seville, I came to my senses and simplified things a bit:
A swamp seemed like a better setting for a frog opera.
My next pass was too unify the color scheme and tighten the drawing:
My team pointed out that this was a little too dark.
And, finally, I lightened the colors up a bit, trimmed the grass, and made Rosina leap:
Hope y'all enjoyed it!
posted by Ryan Germick
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