mardi 27 mars 2012

Jungle illustration and process

This morning I finished a new personal illustration, based on an idea I had of a kitchen filled with potted plants turning into a jungle in a daydream. 


I started with a very rough sketch in photoshop (normally I sketch in pencil first, but this time it just seemed easier to delete and edit as I didn't know really what I wanted). After an hour or so of sketching and deleting, I had arrived at the sketch below. 




I knew by looking at the sketch that I would run into problems when it came to coloring the girl at the table, as my lines are very rough and I hadn't drawn the hands clearly. A clear pencil drawing really makes the difference at the photoshop stage, so I took a pencil and paper and re-drew the daydreaming lady.



Her hair changes in this sketch, which wasn't planned, I just drew it as a preliminary squiggle and hesitated before rubbing it out when I saw that it looked ok. That's what's I find is much fun about drawing pictures, the element of mystery about it. I can have a vague idea of what I want but I'm always surprised buy something that happens along the way. They are not all good surprises though.



Here I've started to colour the background and I've added a paper texture, which I find really adds some nice contrast to the image, and a hint of orangey/brown over the picture helps the different colours to work together.
I tend to try and keep my colour palette small, as it's so difficult to work with more than two or three basic colours. I generally choose one warm and one cool colour and then work with variations on those. 


This is the illustration almost finished. I left it like this overnight and then came back to work on it the next morning. I felt that the bookcase wasn't working where it touches the ground, so I deleted a bit of that. I also added a tiger's tail to get a bit of orange into the bottom left, balancing the orange of the girls hair and helping to draw the eye into the foliage. 




5 commentaires:

  1. Great! A beautiful illustration. I Love it!

    Cheers!!

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  2. Je découvre ton blog par Poolga. Je me permet de te parler français, voyant que tu habites en Normandie..
    je suis admirative de ton coup de crayon (et de stylet) et de ton univers. J'aime beaucoup cette illustration, et c'est très intéressant de voir les étapes de sa réalisation.

    bonne soirée

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    Réponses
    1. Salut Piu!

      Merci beaucoup pour votre message, je suis content que vous aimez bien mes illustrations! Je vois que vous faites aussi de l'art. J'aime bien vos dessins sur votre blog et je retournerai encore pour en voir plus
      : )
      Bonne soirée
      Andrew

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  3. Thanks for sharing your working process, very interesting to see how you come to the final result.
    And the final illustration is great! I love the colours too.

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