Goodbye & Hello

Did one last artwork before the year ends!:) Happy new year everyone have a great start ahead!

Christmas Card Illustration Process

As promised here's the process for this project. This was a design for the Christmas carolers thank you card. Here in the Philippines this is a tradition. Everyone young and old will jump from house to house singing, and the house owners if they like your singing will give you money in return. When I was a kid my siblings and I will get/create musical instruments like stringing bottle crowns together, creating drums from discarded milk cans, or if there really is no time, I just get a spoon & fork and bang them together! And that was the end of my singing career. :) Okay enough flashbacks.

SKETCH
I started with a very quick sketch (I did the sketch on the first paper I got my hands on, I can't find my sketchpads anywhere so the notebook it is! ) The sketch/doodle is very rough, just to get the layout. Next I transferred it on watercolor paper here I refined the line art.

sketch

COLOR
After the detailed sketch I started blocking out the colors, I used watercolor for the sky & tree and used the gouache for the rest. I wanted a colorful opaque style for this, more like a vector feel. Okay if you are looking at my sketch & my colored piece intently like your life depended on it (which I doubt), you will see that I removed an element in the background. What you didn't notice?! I decided to remove the kid & dad in the background so the user will focus on the carolers, KISS (keep it simple stupid). :)

DETAIL

After I blocked the colors I added the details, line art, which needs a lot of concentration... and not breathing... and tongue sticking out on my part.

FINAL ART

And after a couple of hours tadaaaa! I would like to present my present! (get it!) I hope you had a blessed Christmas!

The most wonderful time of the year!

I can't believe December is almost over! I only blogged twice this month! Got caught up with so much work which unfortunately I can't post yet :(. So I did this christmas card illustration instead. This took a while since i'm juggling my office work and our xmas party preparation. Christmas is just 2 days away and i'm sooo excited to spend it with my relatives. So glad to be able to do this illustration for the holidays. Merry Christmas everyone! Will post the step by step process hopefully this December. :)

Peek watercolor process

Here is my watercolor step by step process for making my latest artwork peek!
This was inspired by studio ghibli's The Borrower Arrietty.

 I really love this animated film... anyway back to business, I started this one out with a concept in my head and directly sketched it on the watercolor paper (I know this is not the advisable way to do it, I just got so excited that I decided to directly do it on the canvas). Then I added a warm yellow wash and started painting the leaves. I got carried away and forgot to take a photo of my initial process, sorry guys. My color palette was mostly warm greens, yellow and red because I want it to have a magical glowing feel.

 Next step I painted the cute little girl peeking out of the giant mushroom. The trick with watercolor is to do the coloring with very light tones first (to do this just add copious amounts of water) and add the dark tones little by little, since the magic of watercolor lies in its transparency. :)

After that I added the details, shadows and texture on the girl, leaves, flower & the mushroom. And then I was done. Hooray!

That's all there is to it. If you find this tutorial helpful please comment or share.