Making this piece of art is the most fun I’ve felt creating in a long time! Thats not to say I haven’t enjoyed my previous projects, but I have found myself getting too precious with my art lately, like if I make any mistake it’s the worst thing that has ever happened and I’m a failure… a bit of an exaggeration! I knew my process needed a little shake up so I could get out of my overthinking cycle and this piece was exactly what I needed. Before starting, I studied Ema Malayuka’s illustration’s (studied sounds fancy, but really all I did was have a good instagram stalk). I’ve been a huge fan of her work for a long time and I’m forever in awe of what she makes. If you haven’t seen Ema’s art before I highly recommend checking it out, you really won’t be disappointed! Her work is the perfect combination of playful and loose but with an expert understanding of colour and composition. Being loose is something I always try to be but can never quite reach it, so for this piece I threw all expectations out the window and thought, ‘what would Ema do?’ How could I pull from her art and give it the Emily stamp.
For a while I’ve been wanting to make an illustration featuring murmuration in some way, so I took to my sketchbook to play around with how I could layer the birds together to create a big swoosh in the sky with lots of movement. Using a mix of loose outlines with the shaded bird shapes helped to make the feeling of a super busy scene with pretty minimal effort! I also played around with the idea of roof tops to frame to bottom of the piece, and with that the concept of was in place… I just have to plan it out now right? Ahh well that’s what I usually do, fill pages with thumbnails to find the best composition, plan out the colours digitally, spending hours figuring out where my lights and darks are gonna be. But not this time I say! If I want to be loose I should just start playing around with paint and see what happens. So with nothing but a sketch and a little mood board to off I began work.
At first It looked quite rough, but I persevered and after a bit of time… it still looked rough. So I started to play around with mixed media, switching between my watercolours, pencils, crayons and acrylic gouache to build up the details, and you know what, it still looked rough, but a good kind of rough, one which was playful and dare a say loose. I did it, I achieved loose!! As I started to add in the sky and the birds, I began to really like what I was making, and the best part, I was having fun. Genuine fun without a single worry that at any moment I could ruin the art, which is how I often feel. So, although the finished result had it’s flaws, It didn’t matter to me as I knew the illustration had a lot of potential.
This is the finished piece and I loved it, but I knew I could do better. Plus It didn’t feel like me, mainly because of the lack of collage, which is a staple of my art these days. So, I wanted to try again making sure to fix these few things:
The church towers are too wonky and wide
The rows of houses on the right look strange and the road doesn’t flow nicely
The sketchy coutines of buildings behind the trees aren’t clear enough - they’re getting lost
The pink section of the sky should be more of a statement
The trees are a little too busy and taking attention away from the birds
The swoops around the birds should feel more intentional and not like an after thought… which they were.
Okay, so not much then… I do like it, I promise!
I painted a few sheets of paper, as well as pulling from my extensive paper folder, which was enough to build my roof tops, as well as a few of the birds. This piece could be my most mixed media illustration to date, with the buildings being a mix of collage and watercolour and the sky being very watered down acrylic gouache. I worked into the piece using my Neocolour crayons and Polychromos pencils to build colour and add details. For those interested, the paper I used was the Blockingford hot press watercolour paper (this means it’s lovely and smooth which makes drawing on top with pencils easy).
This is the finished second attempt, which is a vast improvement if you ask me! The composition feels more balanced, the collage was a lovely addition, and the swirls in the sky make the piece more playful and cohesive as they match the branches in the trees. Great, I just have to edit it now.
I should probably mention I was making this illustration to turn into a book cover for an imaginary children’s book, hence the pretty empty space at the top of the image - I was saving that spot for the title. I painted the same words again and again until they were perfect, (the ‘&’ symbol will never not confuse me) and scanned them in, picking the best versions to take into the final.
I scanned in my final illustration and as you can see, the colours are completely faded, with the pink being basically invisible. This is down to my very old scanner which struggles to capture pale shades. So I took to photoshop to work the colour back in, as well as make some slight changes in the composition making the title fit nicer in the space.
After a few hours of playing I had the piece looking even better than the original with a few extra additions, mainly then little sun and the extra which lines to enhance the swooping motion in the piece. All that was left to do was adding in the writing and a spine to make it look like an official book cover.
Here’s the final piece and I couldn’t be happier with it! I love this mixed media approach and I want to continue working in this way moving forward. It’s also helped me realise that planning out a piece isn’t always necessary and by creating in the moment you can make something really successful. This doesn’t mean I’ll never plan out a piece again (I am a bit of a planning addict) but maybe I’ll plan a little less in the future and trust in my skills a bit more.
Thanks for reading,
Emily :)