Greetings from... - Jerusalem Postcard

I have taken the same approach as my other postcards and have drawn half my shapes and then reflected them to ensure they are symmetrical. 

I didn't want the stone arrangement to be symmetrical so I sued the pen tool to make a variety of quadrilaterals to fill the entire space. Rounding the edges of the shapes mimicked the effect of weathering and made the shapes less harsh to look at. 

In some of my roughs I had thought about adding the Dome of the Rock into the background but didn't think it was a good idea. I thought I would try it out briefly anyway but this confirmed that it makes the composition too crowded. I went back to my plan of filling the frame with the stones of the Wailing Wall. 

Adding lines to the bricks made them look more aged and worn. At this point I realised that my colour for the stones was too bright and when referring back to reference imagery, the stones are actually a lot paler than this. The lines didn't integrate into the shape very well so I changed the stroke to one that varied in thickness and came to a point at both ends which looked far more subtle. 

I played around with colour for a while until I settled on this colour for the stones. In photographs, the stones look a lot more white but I wanted my background to have some colour in it, especially as the other predominant shapes in the image are black. I found it difficult to find a happy medium between white/grey and a light brown but I think this is working well. I experimented with a different style or brush to ass some texture to the gaps between the stones but I felt this was taking away from the clean cut images I was making using Illustrator and it wasn't making enough of an impact anyway for me to keep it. 

When axing my peers for their opinion on this postcard at this point, it became apparent that some people didn't even know about the existence of the wailing wall and only a few of the ones that did could recognise it from my image. It was also suggested to me that I alter the shape of the hat because hats worn by Jewish men are usually less angled at the top. This meant I researched into this a bit more to correct the shape, I also added in the flags as proposed in the roughs stage and added in bits of paper between the stones. I thought the white pieces of paper would make the wall more recognisable as people write prayers and post them into the cracks in the wall. 

 I made an adjustment to the position of the flags because I felt that having almost the full symbol on show was quite obvious whereas if I cropped it, it is still recognisable but less of a giveaway. 

Final Postcard