Illustration Friday - Satellite

Last week's word, 'Paisley' left lots of room for interpretation and a chance to explore pattern and color. This week, the word challenge was 'Satellite,' and I have to admit that I wasn't too excited when I opened my email and discovered it was the choice for the week. Nevertheless, I decided to go for it. At first, I bounced back and forth between two ideas - an outer space scene filled with satellites, and a more metaphorical scene depicting a beautiful flower being orbited by insects that circled the flower like little satellites. I think my second idea certainly has potential for a fun and colorful illustration, but I guess I just wasn't energized enough to pursue it (I think I will file that idea away though), so I went with my first, more obvious idea - a depiction of satellites in outer space. Since I've been working a lot with patterns lately, I decided to see what I could do with an outer space themed pattern.

I did a few sketches of satellites in my sketchbook and then went to my computer where I started trying to come up with an appropriate outer space background.  I tried lots of variations and had a difficult time coming up with something that I was happy with.  I started off with a very dark color scheme which I gradually developed into something much lighter.




I started adding some additional colors that I had planned to develop into gas clouds or nebulas, but they just never seemed to look right. I was getting frustrated fast.

Next I tried to see what would happen if I put the image through a posterize filter.  

After that I began to blend the colors, and to lighten them.

Then I decided to duplicate the layer a couple of times.  I tried some different layer blending modes, gave the whole thing a more overall blue color and then added some star-like growth patterns.  By this time, I was definitely getting closer to the image I had in my mind.

After lightening it even more, I finally had something I was happy with.

Here is the image after I started to do some freehand sketching of my satellites over the finished background.  Before starting to draw I had turned on the 'Define Pattern' mode so that anytime a line went off the edge, it would reappear on the opposite side of the drawing and would thus line up properly when tiled.  This of course, slowed down my pen a lot, which was frustrating. As you may notice, I originally had an extra satellite in the image, but I decided to take it out after doing a test of how the pattern looked when tiled.  The extra satellite, since it was a vertical object, tended to create a vertical stripe when the image was repeated so I decided to remove it.

Here is the final painted image after I removed the extra satellite.  You can see what the image looks like tiled as a pattern at the top of this post. 

Thanks for reading this, I hope you found it interesting.

Illustration Friday - Cocoon

It's hard to believe that another Friday has rolled around.  This week's word for the Illustration Friday challenge is cocoon.  Of course my first thought was to do something with a butterfly.  I thought I could do something unusual by showing what happens inside the cocoon while the transformation is taking place. Maybe a caterpillar knitting her wings or maybe cozily curled up reading a book while she waits for her wings to grow.  But then, while looking at a book put out by Taschen called "Future Perfect, Vintage Futuristic Graphics," and getting excited by all of the unusual gadgets, machines and visions of what we used to think the future would look like, I decided to take the challenge in a whole other direction. My idea was to create a faux vintage magazine cover, a cover similar in style to those that use to grace "Popular Science" or "Science and Mechanics," in the days when they had great painted cover illustrations that depicted the wonders of the future. So to tie this in with the cocoon challenge, I decided to have the cover illustration of my faux magazine be a human cocoon device for hibernating during long interplanetary space voyages.  I decided I would have a father showing off this device to his son to prepare him for their own voyage into outer space.

In painting it, I looked at a lot of old "Popular Science" covers and noticed that they used a lot of bright primary colors, so that is how I decided on my palette. The illustration was drawn and painted in Corel Painter 11.  After the illustration itself was finished, I opened it in Photoshop and applied a halftone filter to it.  I then added the magazine border and created the fake masthead.  I ran the whole image through some third party filters to give it the look of an aged printed image. I then created a fake mailing address label and as a tribute to my late father, I used his name on it. One of the last steps was to come up with the fake article titles.  I enjoyed doing that, but I probably could have come up with better ones, if I had thought about it a little longer.

Below, you can see my first digital sketch of the idea.  Next to it, on the right is the original Painter image before adding the type and applying the Photoshop filters to it.