Storm- Rain Cloud

I've been wanting to take lyrical inspiration from one of my favourite Texan DIY artists this semester, the incredibly talented Daniel Hunter of Analog Rebellion. Once of Illustration Friday's Word of the weeks was "Storm", so I used that chance to render a tamer image of what that word brings to mind.

This one started weeks ago, with countless sketches in my sketchbook trying to figure out what how I wanted to start this. I originally was going to transfer the idea to illustrator, however I recently decided to pick up black paper and a metallic marker from the local dollar store. I've been practicing with metallic hand lettering lately, so I decided to start this assignment with the same materials.

I then moved to photoshop, where I worked out the reference images for the second element of the illustration:

I made several paths for different shapes of this person, and temporarily filled it with different colours to get an idea of what the final image would look like.

(Looks pretty cool with these colours, too!)

I then masked each shape with a selection from the cloud, and added a colour overlay of various shades of gray. I then masked the cloud selection into various lines to represent pouring rain. (and added a little icon for a signature at the bottom with my initials.)
I also made a path to add a small bit of type to the top of the cloud, the beginning to my favourite line in  Analog Rebellion's "Rain Cloud".

Finally I worked with transforming characters of the last two words of lyrics to fit inside the cloud in a variety of shapes and sizes. I made a selection of the type and masked it into the cloud, and added the rain drops from outside the cloud to the mask inside the cloud. 

I think this one looks pretty cute; perhaps too cute for Analog Rebellion's style, but definitely cute enough for my own.  :)

Talent- Tell Me Your Secrets

The second word of the week I chose from for my next illustration was talent- and immediately the first thing that came to mind was magicians! I started with a few sketches on paper and decided the best medium to try for this piece was watercolour. I was pretty exited to try a layering technique to create the magic 'smoke' coming out from the wand.

Heres the sketch of the hat that I had started to paint on. I have countless other thumbnails of it in my sketchbook, but this is what I eventually came up with (with a watercolour part already a bit started).

Once the hat and wand was done, I began to work on layering the clouds up and around the page into the wand. I worked with really wet washes of blobs around the page, starting with really light grey and working my way into darker colours. Heres an example:

Which brings us to our final image, where I then added in a few sprays of white acrylic paint to give it some sparkle:

My next two illustrations will be based on the words "Swim" and "Storm"- One being another digital painting, and the other a vector illustration. Both are being worked on at the moment, and I hope to have one posted by next week.

Ocean- Stars.

Here is the progress on one of the first additions to the collection of illustrations I'll be working on in my modern illustration class. Inspiration is taken from one of illustrationfriday.com's word of the week- I started when the week was focused on the ocean- so I then started on doing a digitally illustrated/hand lettered piece based on one of my favourite parts of the ocean- the starfish.

I first started with some very rough thumbnails to get an idea of where I wanted to place everything on the canvas, making sure that both the starfish and the type got equal representation.From there, I had a start on how I figured out everything would look within the image, and started on a second sketch placing the rocks, beach, and starfish in a separate file.

I then went with rendering the rocks, using one of my favourite photoshop brushes, named "soft oil pastel" It gives a rough, painted texture to the page and I love the overall style it gives to most of my digital illustrations. I start off with a grey colour at 100% opacity and then added other shades of grey at very low opacities ranging from 5-15%. At such low opacity I find it easier to blend the shades.

From there I took a small hard round brush and added a fair amount of scatter and spacing to the brush settings to create a sand texture, which I added along the cracks and edges of the rocks and then started on the actual sand of the beach using the same brush technique.  I start on the water, but I ended up changing it later on.

Moving on, I start to illustrate the lettering. On the first layer, I started working on the actual words using the same oil pastel brush as before, giving each character the my current favourite texture. I then went and put a hand-rendered shadow in a lower layer, helping the words stand out from the background.

After, I added some flat colour, then the simplest of shading with the oil pastel brush. I then changed the opacity on my brush several times to smooth in the shading, changed the brush to a hard round brush with scatter and spacing to give a bit of texture, and I ended up adding in more parts on top of the starfish, in varying size and colour.

 I then added shading to the sand, and took out and re-did the water by adding in different gradients and a bit of splashing water around the rock, to get the final image!  Heres the process of the illustration from start to finish:

I'm pretty pleased with what came out of this assignment, and to have it done on time, and I'm also excited to start on the next illustration for this class!