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!

Lino-Cut Lady

Latest assignment for my Illustration Essentials class. Creating a self portrait using a lino-cut print.
Here is what I ended up with. Inspired again by Art Nouveau prints.
At first I left it with a violet background:

4 x 6''

Then I decided I wanted a white background:

4 x 6''

And then I wanted to see what it would look like if I tried to embrace the texture that cutting to the white created:

4 x 6''

So yeah, not really a particular likeness to me, but I wasn't really going for that. I guess it's more of a spiritual/personality portrait, haha. This was pretty fun:)

Initial sketch:

Yogurt (or Jam) Label continued

Okay so more progress on the label:
*note: the colours aren't that vibrant. They're softer in real life.

I'm going to touch a few things up (in PS) for sure, but hopefully this is close to done!:)

Okay, NOW it's done!

Original size: 11 x 5.75''

Media: gouauche + colored inks + watercolors + rapidograph pen

Yogurt Label

So this is Iconography project #5 -- designing a label for a food item. My food shall be yogurt and I'm thinking of calling it Entice, Entreat, or Forbidden Flavours:) Style wise I will be going for an Art Nouveau meets pin-up girl, with a soft green/yellow/pinkish palette. Here are the stages of my progress so far:

Flavour Combo sketch (Sinful Trio: Pear-Apple-Cinnamon)

Playing around with some stylizing

label design, hopefully ready to be coloured!