A look into my creative process and up coming work.
Happy Thursday everyone!
Before beginning my first blog post, I’m going to set down some ground rules and guidelines. So Thursday might be the day for a weekly blog post, or at least a content update. You all can feel free to leave your comments or thoughts below. This is a safe space! Negative comments will be blocked, reported and removed.
So today I’m going to discuss my process. Generally, this is the way I work with most of my artwork, but it does vary.
Finding inspiration and that spark of creativity can be very challenging sometimes! Generally, I will start with research and save images I gravitate towards to find my inspiration. I like using Pinterest as a source of inspiration. It is easy to use and I can find everything related to a project and save it on one board.
Overall, my process is pretty broken up. In particular, it's because of the clear and concise method it creates when I work with clients. Having stages makes it easy to communicate what the client wants and what I think works best. If any changes need to be made, it makes it easy to fix in the early stages.
First things first, I generally I being with something very rough. A greyscale sketch with a bit of structure to it. The next step is to refine the rough messy sketch into clean lines. This is also the stage where any compositional changes would need to be made.
In this scenario, there weren't any major changes between these two steps; only a slight change in perspective and the background. Sometimes the line work might be very clean and sometimes it might be a little messy and wonky. In this case, it was a little bit in-between but there was a lot of line detail added to clarify the idea.
Moving on to colour, I generally start with flats. I’ll mess around with the colour options underneath the line art and see what looks alright. Here the image starts to fall apart and look a bit like a mess without the lines, but bear with me here because this works! I’ll generally also mess around with the mood of the image and what time of day we are aiming for, this is just one variation of this image that I chose to go with.
After adding in shadows, lighting and additional effects the piece looks much better and like a finished piece of art!
This project of environment exploration was very enjoyable for me as a whole. This piece in particular was quick and felt very fitting with the current season. Although it's not completely perfect because it's not the final composition this project went forward with, it’s still something I am very content with!
Talk soon!
- Niki