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!