Creating an Illustration

It seems like when­ever I talk with other artist’s, one of the first ques­tions they ask is “How do you work?”  Most of the artist’s that I know start out with sketches, but I have to be hon­est, I don’t do a lot of sketch­ing. Sketch­ing wasn’t a require­ment for our projects in art school, so I never got into the habit of cre­at­ing them.

I  just fin­ished up this great hol­i­day piece, so I thought I would share with you all how I actu­ally DO WORK.

1. THE IDEA

My first step is the idea stage. I quickly jot down my ideas in a writ­ten list form and then I go for the one I think would be the most fun. For this piece, my idea was Santa deliv­er­ing pack­ages, but I didn’t want to go with the tra­di­tional sleigh. My hus­band LOVES vin­tage Volk­swa­gen Vans so I went that route.

2 & 3. THE QUICK SKETCH

I guess I do sketch – just not in the tra­di­tional sense. I like to do a quick sketch of the stars of my piece. For this piece, I did my quick sketch of SANTA & the VAN to see how things might go.  If I can’t come up with a quick sketch that I like, then I scrap the idea and move on. Here are my first two idea sketches.

4. OTHER CHARACTERS

Once I have my STARS ready to go, I start work­ing on the sup­port­ing char­ac­ters. For this piece, there are two elves and also a tree/presents. Some­times I know ahead of time that I am going to add cer­tain char­ac­ters, such as the elves – they were always the plan. But then I needed to fill an empty van win­dow (tree) and then I knew I would be need­ing some color on the top of the van (presents).

5. THE BACKGROUND

Once I have my char­ac­ters mapped out, I start on the back­ground. Start­ing on the back­ground also allows me to start think­ing about my color choices. In this case, Santa had a white beard so I knew that my back­ground was going to need to be AT LEAST a medium shade to knock-out his beard. I was also set on him dri­ving down a snowy road and then decided on the trees as a way to add inter­est with­out dis­tract­ing from my characters.

6. THE DETAILS

I gen­er­ally work on the base of my char­ac­ters and the get the back­ground to that same base level before I start work­ing on the details. I also choose col­ors at this point so that I know which col­ors I am going to need to work through­out the piece. Details are mostly things like adding shad­ing or pat­terns. It is gen­er­ally the details that really spice up a piece.

7. FINISHING UP

Once I have the major­ity of the details filled in, it is time to start fin­ish­ing up. Fin­ish­ing up includes things like check­ing for sup­port­ing details that are over­pow­er­ing the main char­ac­ters or chang­ing the shade of the back­ground if it is too light or dark. It could also be adding a lit­tle more detail to spots that seem bor­ing

8. CREATING PRODUCTS

Most of my illus­tra­tions are cre­ated for stock imagery (for design­ers) or for items to be added in my shop. For this piece I decided to cre­ate a poster and also a gift set series. You can see these and all of my other 2012 Hol­i­day Designs in my Etsy Shop!

Hope­fully this gives you some idea of how my ideas come together. Do you sketch? If so, does your orig­i­nal sketch gen­er­ally end up being a big part of your final piece?

Need a Dose of Cute?

Today I have been in need of some cute so I went in search of some cute stuff! It seems that every­thing I find cute is either kid or ani­mal related so today we are going with some cute kid stuff and then i will do another cute on kids or real life ani­mal cute!
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Where Have I Been? Shooting Photos!

Last year I pur­chased a new SLR cam­era and an amaz­ing ball-head tri­pod. Upon pur­chase, I found that with this new equip­ment, I wasn’t able to shoot my pho­tos like I used to.
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New Fall Prints and Postcards

Just wanted to share these fun new fall prints I just listed in the shop. The first is a cute squir­rel cou­ple shar­ing nuts and the sec­ond is a set of acorns fea­tur­ing pat­terned typog­ra­phy and cute nuts!
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New Toy in the Shop!

Where the heck have I been? I got a new toy! The amaz­ing Beth from Theme Fra­grance on Etsy talked me into buy­ing a new toy – THANK YOU Beth! I hadn’t planned on it, but how could I pass up a great idea.
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Illustration Friday: Burst

This is the first in a series of fun fruit char­ac­ters that I am work­ing on. This is Petey the Peach and he worked out for this weeks Illus­tra­tion Fri­day theme of Burst. Don’t go burst­ing Petey’s bub­bles because he is hav­ing a peachy day!
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Color Box: Fresh Air

Neu­trals are the best! I admit it, I love them. I would choose a clas­sic neu­tral like moss green over a neon or a kelly green every time. When I first started art school, I always used brights because I was not a good paint mixer. Now that I real­ize the sub­tle love­li­ness of muted col­ors, I am hooked. This weeks color box is a lovely neu­tral green palette with a dash of khaki, rust and grey.
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Typography: Ride My Bike Font Family

Find­ing a strong dec­o­ra­tive type­face can be a chal­lenge. Dec­o­ra­tive type­faces can be gaudy and/or have an unpol­ished feel. I was thrilled to run across the Ride My Bike type­face because it is both unique and very pol­ished. This is a great casual type­face with plenty of great vari­a­tion and guess what – it is on sale – yeah!
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AS">Packaging: La Boheme Cafe by Holidesign AS

Pack­ag­ing is a very impor­tant part of any company’s brand­ing ini­tia­tive. As I am work­ing on build­ing my own brand, it seems like more pack­ag­ing designs are catch­ing my eye. This pack­ag­ing project/branding redesign for La Boheme Cafe was designed by Holidesign AS and fea­tured on the amaz­ing blog, The Dieline. The Col­ors & pat­tern use imme­di­ately caught my eye but when I laid eyes on the before & after – I was sold!
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