Happy Holidays & Season's Greetings

Happy December!

Today, I present to you my 2019 holiday art designs.

I was inspired by folk art and cut-out paper snowflakes that I often see around the holidays.

I completed most of the design work in Adobe Illustrator and then added the finishing touches of digital foil effects in Photoshop.

I ended up printing my postcards with Moo and using their gold foil customization option. I printed 5 different colour versions and was very happy with the results!

(In the version I sent in for print, I did not have the digital foil effect on the tree)

If you'd like to try printing with Moo, you can get 20% off your first order with this {referral link}.

Prints are merchandise are available through my online shops below:

RedBubble

Society6

TeePublic

Happy Holidays!

Resource Credits

Typeface: "Amazinga": https://creativemarket.com/ianmikraz/66045-Amazinga-Typeface
Textures:
Foil & Glitter Texture: https://creativemarket.com/Imagearea/1662530-Foil-Glitter-Texture
Gold Foil Textures, Gold Backgrounds: https://creativemarket.com/PaperElement/194964-Gold-Foil-Textures-Gold-Backgrounds

Elvish Trees

Hello again,

Tonight, I am pleased to share with you my latest personal project - "Elvish Trees", in which I was inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth Elf culture. For stylistic reference I looked at the illustrations in The Lord of The Rings novels but created my own original designs which I could imagine to be on things like banners of the different elvish families.

I started out, as usual, with pencil sketches.

Then, I finessed each sketch in Adobe Illustrator and established my colour palettes. After which, I brought the rendered trees into Photoshop to add some texture effects.

Alda
“Alda”, in Quenya meaning "tree"

Ornë Ornë in Quenya meaning 'slender tree'

Lûth Galadh
“Lûth Galadh”, in Sindarin meaning "Spell-Tree"

Prints can be found on my Society6 and RedBubble shops. More merchandise will be made available in the following weeks. 

That's it for now. :)

Ostara Tarot Card Designs

Hello and Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a great holiday. I had a pretty busy one. But it was a good kind of busy, so it was a pleasant time.

One of the projects I was working on was for a Ostara Tarot, which is collective of lovely illustrator ladies from Vancouver who are making their very own tarot card deck. They will also be having an art show, where there deck will be launched, in late March.

What they hired me to do, was come up with some designs to go on the back of the cards. I was given a generous amount of freedom with my designs, so I was very excited to get started. My inspiration came from Norse and Celtic knot-work, and the word "Ostara" itself, which is one of the names applied to the celebration of the spring equinox. For the most part, I chose colours and shapes which alluded to the blossoming of flowers and to the hues prominent during dawn and dusk.

I chose to render my designs in Adobe Illustrator because I wanted to learn how to better create knot-work art with vector shapes. Also, I wished to achieve perfect symmetry because I thought it important that the backs of the cards do not prematurely reveal that the face card may be upside down - a variable some tarot readers an important part of their fortune telling.

As always I started a handful of thumbnail sketches, which I'm not showing because they ended up scattering all over my notebook and became to troublesome to scan.

Then, I picked out some of my favourite ideas and drew them a bit bigger.

Then, one by one, I worked on each idea in Illustrator, with some coming along quicker than others. Design A was the fastest out of them all to come to completion.

Design A

Design B, which is actually the last sketch in that picture, took the longest, and was the last to be finished. After working on it and feeling dissatisfied, I decided to temporarily move on to the next idea.

Design B Works-In-Progress: Initially, I liked the shimmering light idea for the background, but just quite wasn't happy with the look 

Design B WIPs: many new thumbnails and experiments later, I ended up with a much more different look, but one that was more harmonious with the other two designs.

Design B: Finished (Or is it? Dun...dun...dun)

Design C might look most laborious in regards with intertwining the knots (which is more tedious to do digitally in Illustrator, than transitionally with paint), but it came together fairly quickly after I was satisfied with the colour scheme.

Design C

And here are all three illustrations together. They've been cropped to how the cards will be trimmed, and I've given them a subtle paper texture (in Photoshop).

Here are some close up shots.

(click to enlarge)

And that's it for the art, for now anyway. There may be some subtle changes in the future, but today I feel like these pieces are finished. Which design is your favourite and you think would look best on a tarot deck? Please let me know in the comments! :)

*Edit - decks are now being printed, and you can pre-order one right here at the Ostara Tarot Shop.

P.S. - If you're interested in learning how to create knot-work in illustrator too. Here are some of the tutorials that helped me:

"Three Ways to Create Celtic Knots in Illustrator" - by Iaroslav Lazunov via Tutsplus
"Drawing celtic knotwork 1" + "Drawing celtic knotwork 2" by Greg Kulz

I feel like I should write a tutorial on subject myself because I've picked up a few tricks throughout the process. Hopefully I'll make it happen sometime!

Hope you enjoyed this first blog post of 2015. Happy January!

 

Letters Can Become Reeds

Happy Wednesday!

I  got back from a trip to New York recently and there's lots to show and tell there. But that will have to wait till later this week, or possibly early next week. Right now I'm swamped with different projects here and there, so bear with me.
In the mean time though - let me share with you a little something I've been working on on my breaks. I'm trying to do more illustrated type and here's the result of a sketchbook doodle I started while the song "Smother" by Daughter was stuck in my head once, especially my favourite bit -

 "Where all my layers can become reeds
All my limbs can become trees"

And, eventually this happened:

This is simple a digital piece - a vector image layered on top of my textile textures. Nothing too fancy, but I like it. :)

And of course, some process steps for you:

sketchbook drawing

vector text/image layer

I decided to just work with the quote.

finished piece

I made the colours a little less saturated and earthy, and layered a leaf textile texture in the background.

I also played around with a darker background, but I think I prefer the light version.

Prints available at my Society6 shop {here}

Dessert Time!

So, for my Digital Illustration course the first assignment was to create 8 icons - 4 simple vector ones, and 4 corresponding more detailed digital ones. I like colourful desserts so I decided to go with that theme.

First I did my sketches:

(this was the easy part)

Then I decided to go and do my vector icons:

Then I transferred my sketches into Illustrator and live traced them to create my contour lines. I then decided to print them out and colour the pictures traditionally (using watercolor paints).

I then scanned those and did the live trace again. I tweeked some things here and there and I ended up with these guys:)

Happy Sunday!