If I remember rightly (as I’ve been working on these for a few months), the idea of a cowgirl for Taurus came fairly quickly. As with Aries being represented by a male animal, the same is true for Taurus, which (if you’re a Taurus, you’ll know) is the bull. And similarly to Aries, I didn’t just want to do the female version of the bull (a cow). I wanted something cooler and more feminine in its own right, rather than just being a gender swap of what already exists, if that makes sense.
As with pretty much all my designs, I got distracted by something when looking for inspiration, and with this one it was space cowgirls, which took me on an exploratory journey via Space Cowboy by Jamiroquai.
I learned it’s actually inspired by the Japanese anime Cowboy Bebop, which I never knew existed (it’s on Netflix and I keep meaning to check it out!).
Anyway, there are a bunch of cool characters, but I took inspiration from Faye Valentine, who has a really great outfit and I borrowed her heart belt buckle.
Cowgirl > Cowboy > Space Cowboy > Cowoy Bebop > Faye Valentine > Heart belt
A few other details to point out: the bull has a nose ring, which references the Taurus glyph. I’m a bit overly sensitive about animals, so I toyed back and forth with whether to move its nose ring (my other idea was to make it a piece of jewellery for my cowgirl. I still keep changing my mind on this but did seem like a good place to put it from a design perspective.
The colour palette is deliberately Taurian (at least according to what Pinterest told me it should be).
The zigzag background lines are a representation of Earth element, as Taurus is an Earth sign, and the more widely known elemental symbol is included as well in the top left side. The Taurian constellation is also on the top right hand sign.
I always get a bit overwhelmed when choosing fonts because there’s just a never-ending supply of amazing ones out there, but I was actually really happy with this one. I thought it was just a perfect fit.
I drew this one several times and really struggled with the scale and the angle of both the bull and the cowgirl. In the end, I gave up trying to do it as a pure biro drawing, so once I was mostly happy with it, I basically redrew it all again in Illustrator. That said, I think it’s turned out well, with a deliberately digital, almost comic book style. This is also why her outfit is quite simple, I just don’t have the perspective skills (yet). I strugged so much that after soooo many hours trying to perfect her face I gave up and that is why she has ended up with star sunglasses.
But here she is, I love her, and I hope you think she’s cool too.
She’s now on a t-shirt in that 100% organic natural raw cotton fabric which feels like the perfect fit for this earth sign.
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