It’s been quite a long time since I’ve felt a time crunch with a piece of art, with this one really pushing my ‘stay awake until its finished’ way of working - ahhh the good old university days came rushing back to me! I made this piece after a prompt from my agent about a new picture book idea looking for an illustrator. The story was very much up my street, so I jumped to it and started making a piece which would fit the book nicely (in order to give myself the best chance of being chosen for the job). Having said this, I never heard back, so I’m going to assume I wasn’t chosen… not to worry, theres plenty more fish in the sea, plus I’ve got a nice piece for my portfolio now. For context, the piece had to be finished in just a few days and the prompt was to make a piece with a family of animals in their natural habitat, curling up to sleep.
Colour mock
About and hour after receiving the email I had frantically thrown together a mood board and landed on the idea of birds. That way the background could be mainly sky which would help with the time crunch… that and I love birds! I scribbled a few rough compositions and very quickly landed on the idea above. With no time to waste, I dragged the sketch into photoshop and whipped up a very quick colour mock. Now I just had to figure out how to make it. If I had the time I would have played around with media to figure out the best look for the piece, but I didn’t so I went with the most reliable media I know - a mix of traditional collage with a whole bunch of photoshop editing! Not the most fun way of working but I can’t deny It get the job done.
I started by working on the birds. I loved the way the bird looked in my colour mock, so I tried a few different attempts to capture it. I wasn’t particularly taken by any, but I knew if I took the best parts from each and edited them together I would have something which worked. Next I moved on to the tree. Although I knew most of this piece would be made through photoshop, the thought of piecing together branch by branch digitally filled me with dread! Even though It would be a paint to edit all the background out, making the tree traditionally would be much more fun and save my sanity! Plus there’s a certain look to traditional collage which just can’t be captured when done digitally. Theres a lovely charm and wonkey-ness to it!
With my tree and birds finished, It was time to paint a bunch of textures and get scanning! My main goal was to paint bird nest appropriate textures so I could piece it together on photoshop. I try to make as much of my art traditionally as possible, but there are certain ideas I have where I know it would be almost impossible to achieve the look without photoshop, and a texture filled bird nest is one of them.
.Scan time!
I also painted a bunch of sky options, trying my best to match the colours in my initial colour mock.
Editing time!
I started by removing all the background from my tree scan (a very tedious task) and placing this on top of a bunch of sky attempts. This blog post will in no way come close to truly showing the whole editing process - a process which had 100s of layers and iterations, but I’ve done my best to capture the key moments in my two day long editing journey. There is so much work which goes in to making everything fit together and compliment each other. Countless colour tweaks and readjusting the smallest of details. Take the tree for example, almost all the branches have been edited in some way to make the colours pop out in the right areas and fade away in others. Just getting the nest to look like it was sitting on the tree in a natural way was hours worth of work. It’s at times like this when I begin to question If I even want to work like this, sure the end result looks good, but is it worth it when the process is so draining! Art is supposed to be fun, and when you’re having fun it reflects in the out come of the piece in a positive way. If I didn’t have the time pressure and played around more with traditional elements, could I get this piece to be better? I think I could. Any way I’m getting side tracked!
Adding in the sky
Building the nest
Adding in my birds
For the leaves I decided to work smarter, not harder and steal a few from this piece which I had just completed a couple days before! Of course they needed a lot of alterations when it came to the colour, but the shape was perfect. I reused the same two leaves for this piece and just edited them to be ever so slightly different sizes using the warp tool.
It’s starting to come together!
Very late in to the night and almost two solid days of starting at a screen later, I had made it! I decided to give the piece a last minuet flip as I thought it flowed nicer. Don’t get me wrong, I am very proud of this piece and it’s currently in my portfolio, (an honour reserved for only my finest work) but it has made me re think my process. If I was to make a children’s book, would I want to commit to 24 spreads (or how ever many it would be) of this way of working? Probably not! I want my work to me more mixed media and I want to have fun making art. Hopefully more playful work to come - watch this space!
Thanks for stopping by <3