Best of Both Worlds

Of digital and traditional illustration techniques that is:)

Firstly, I have to say that I think that it takes tremendous amounts of talent to skillfully utilize both the traditional media and digital tools. Both have their value and neither is inherently (for no obvious reason) better than the other. And when both digital and traditional techniques are applied together, wonders can happen! Yes, yes they can:)

Now, I'm not implying that the following pieces are the wonders I spoke of, but I think they're pretty good examples of digital and traditional techniques can have a happy marriage.

So, for this project we had to make "Greeting" card type of patterns.
To create a uniform feel for my vine shapes I decided to first quickly draft out their basic outline in Illustrator, and they looked like this:

I then traced over these shapes and filled them in with my design. (Sketches of this step will be added sometime later)

I then coloured my patterns with waterproof coloured inks and they looked like this:

I then scanned these and brought them into Photoshop where layered and blended them to make my patterns which ended up looking like this:

Art Nouveau inspired style and colouring

So, in the end they have a hand drawn appearance yet they are still fairly similar and the vine outlines aren't tremendously crooked. Not to mention - I didn't have to paint dozens of microscopic identical flowers:)

Happy Thursday!