You know when you spend so long looking at a piece of art, you don't even know what looks good and what looks bad anymore… well thats how I feel about this piece! This is an illustration I made back in October 2023, but I feel it deserves it’s own blog post due to the sheer amount of work I put in to it. I learnt a lot with this piece, as this was the first time I had ever tried to merge my painted characters with a collaged environment, and I didn’t make it easy of my self either! ‘Ah yes, I can paint 19 characters and a whole background for them to inhabit, it will be fine!’ To put this into a bit more context, I made this piece for my children’s illustration portfolio, as a spread for a book I’m brainstorming. It took me three weeks to make… THREE WEEKS! So lets go from the start.
Back in summer 2023 I entered my mouse obsession. What started as a pretty mindless doodle session, quickly turned into the only thing I drew for weeks. A little seed of an idea pooped into my head about a mouse parade, and with that the marching band was born. I knew I wanted to do something a little more ambitious with these guys and pop them inside a whole scene, but the pressure of making such a complicated illustration meant it was an Idea I kept pushing further and further down the to do list.
Eventually, enough was enough; I couldn’t put this piece off any longer! So three months after the initial idea, I began drawing thumbnails. I had a pretty clear vision in mind for this piece so it didn’t take long for a composition to start taking shape, then It was just a case of refining my sketch and moving on to colour. This was easier said than done, as drawing all those little mice was a big task!
To test out the colours, I take a photo of my sketch and take it into photoshop. From there I’ll lower the opacity of the drawing so I can see just a faint outline, set the layer to multiply so it becomes transparent, and I can start adding colour underneath. I love to plan out the colours this way as it takes all the pressure away. I can fiddle with to my hearts content with every colour under the sun until I find the best combination.
With every thing planned, I moved on to making the final. This was extremely daunting as really I hadn’t a clue about how to approach this it. The only time I had very combined my collage with painted characters was on the piece above, which is very simple and doesn’t have any overlap between the two mediums. I was diving in to the unknown, and many mistakes were about to be made…
To begin, I painted loads of paper, being quite specific with the textures I was trying to create. I wanted there to be a wispiness to the background, to create a feeling of lots of layered grass blades, which gently merged into the path below. At first I tried to collage the background traditionally, spending hours attempting to perfectly jigsaw my pieces of paper together. But as I went on the more I realised that firstly, I didn’t have enough of certain textures, and secondly it was too harsh! This wasn’t the smooth, delicate background I had in mind. If I tried to edit my mice on top of this, they would get lost in amongst all the business!
So, after a brief wobble, I knew I needed to try a different approach. I had some really nice textures which showed promise so I scanned them in and began playing around with them on photoshop. This way I could seamlessly merge textures into each other, and push and pull shapes to fill the space I needed - It was starting to take shape.
I printed out my base background to traditionally collage into, as I wanted to make as much of the piece away from my laptop screen as possible. This did mean when I scanned the art back in and started working digitally again, I had to edit out the printed background and cut around every little detail. A tedious task but at least it meant I could edit the flowers separately from the background which gave me a lot of freedom to play around with lighting.
Once I had a collaged environment I was pleased with, I moved on to the huge task of painting the characters. To begin, I sketched out lots of mice and and brought them all together into photoshop where I could play around with the composition and placement, to get the best marching band formation. I then spent the next few days painting mouse after mouse, a very fiddle task when each mouse is about an inch big! For the mice I painted them in watercolour and added detail with coloured pencils and crayons. Then for the flowers I used collage.
Painting the characters, although time consuming, was a pretty simple task compared to the next step… joining everything together. This felt like I was running a photoshop marathon with no end in sight. I spent days trying to wrap my head around how to make these two medias sit alongside each other in a cohesive way. Shadows and lighting helped a lot with this step, but there was still so much adjusting which needed to be done to make sure the mice weren’t clashing with anything around them. In hindsight I should have painted the characters first and built the environment around them, I recon that would have saved at least a days worth of work. I pretty much had to re do the background a second time once the characters were in place.
I’m still not 100% certain if the two medias work together. This could be down to the fact that this was my first ever attempt at working like this, or it could be down to how different the two mediums look along side each other. I tried a similar technique a few months after making this piece which I think was much more successful; this time the difference being I used acrylic to paint the girl character as opposed to watercolour. I think this much better suites the collage texture, seen as they’re also painted in acrylic!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still extremely proud of this piece. I think the outcome, although not exactly what I was hoping for, Is fun and shows a lot of potential for where I can push my collage further. This piece ran so my crocodile illustration could fly - is that how the saying goes?! Making this taught me a lot, so for that, I am grateful I spent three weeks loosing my mind over it… well at least that what I keep trying to tell myself! Ahh the joys of art.
Thank you for reading,
Emily :)