Jordyn Crema

Illustrations: Practice and experiments.

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I kept trying to redraw this in photoshop using really bright colours and couldn't get it to work. In the end I live-traced it in illustrator and fixed it up with some brushes in photoshop. I definitely prefer the more natural/muted colours to the brighter ones for this piece. I certainly didn’t start out with my strongest experiment from this semester, but I wanted to feel like I had made progress and the scale illustration seemed like a great starting point.

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I’m planning to digitally recreate my mushroom drawing, this is the first rough with the main colours blocked out!

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Scale and Perspective Illustration experiment

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Nanaimo Museum Bastion illustrations - While I think I could have improved on the doodles in the square format if I’d spent more time I am overall happy with how it turned out, especially looking back at my rough.

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Mixed media celebrity portrait of Andrew McMahon (in the Wilderness) (except I think the reference photo is definitely pre-wilderness era)

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My intent is to illustrate the bastion in a simple way, and have intricate doodle waves along the bottom.... I also tried creating waves in illustrator but wasn’t able to find a method I liked.

I’m working on doodling the waves in a way that will allow them to integrate with the museum logo.

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For this week’s illustration experiment I looked through my photos library for landscape photos from back home. I had a hard time deciding on which one to try and recreate, so I settled for a kind of mix and match of elements from photos I liked a lot. 

I used Acrylic Gouache in my sketchbook for this one. Landscapes are another thing I’m not well-practiced in but would love to work on more. This was a quick little experiment, but I could imagine getting the hang of it if I put in the time and work.

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Thumbs&Roughs

I have to admit it was hard to come up with ideas for thumbs at first. I read through everything I could find online for inspiration.

My favourite idea so far is my first rough, which would be a simple silhouette of the bastion with the museum’s logo cut out. I think I would do the bastion in a single shade of blue from the museum’s colour scheme.

Rough number two the idea is to have the bastion with waves representing the ocean at the bottom, with the “waves” lined up with the bastion as the museum logo,

Third is another simple almost silhouette depiction, but this one is made up of lines. I’d like to cut out some negative space from the lines, either details from the bastion or the logo like rough #1. I think it’ll be good to explore these ideas a little more digitally in the next week.

I would also possibly like to play around with the idea of including people for a sense of community in the scene, but would feel more comfortable exploring that digitally as well.

I think the designs I’ve explored so far would work really well for the square image, but maybe a zoomed out scene including small figures would work for the banner image.

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For this week’s illustration experiment I spent quite some time doodling in ink, and a lot of time cleaning up and playing with the ink doodles in illustrator before decking to lay them over some appropriately spooky colours. 

While I’m not entirely proud of the result I had a lot of fun exploring, and I would definitely like to play with and practice these hybrid illustration techniques in the future. 

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This week’s experiment certainly was experimental. I wanted to try out the illustrator live tools we’d used for our colouring pages again so I sketched this design in ink in my sketchbook before image tracing the photo.  I used coolers to find a colour palette I liked, which at first looked like a group of autumn/halloween colours to me, but in practice has a very retro-my-mom’s-living-room feel.  I ended up bringing it over to photoshop to use the brushes to colour the design. I had a lot of fun trying out some of the free textures from our class resources. In the end I’m thinking I went overboard on a few of them, but overall I’m pleased with my attempt. 

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I spent a few hours playing around in illustrator and had quite a few unfinished vector illustrations with no real direction. In the end I took my vectorized inktober snake drawing and changed the stroke colour, and plunked it on top of this background that I didn’t know what else to do with.

While I didn’t end up with any well thought out illustrations like I’d intended it was a good illustrator refresher, and I certainly learned a thing or two through all of the experimentation. 

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The top photo is my final B&W design, and the two bottom represent the choices I’m playing with for the background detail. I think I may vectorize both options in illustrator and decide from there, it will be good practice either way.

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This illustration experiment “people doing things” is actually the one that has taken me the longest, despite looking like it only took 5 minutes.

I immediately had the idea of drawing people doing things in a continuous line style of illustration. I started by brainstorming anything I could think of that people do that could be drawn. I narrowed it down to a few activities I personally enjoy, and started sketching those. In the end I drew silhouette type images based on stock photos, so I had some sort of shadow to “trace” for the lineart.

Initially I thought it would be fairly easy to get the results I wanted, but this exercise is a lot harder than I remember it being. Several pieces of paper and a couple hours later I decided to try and trace my favourite composition digitally.

I definitely think it looks like more of a concept than a finished illustration, but after so much time I think it’s time to call it a week. 

Looking back at the original line drawings I’d done I’ve simplified the shapes a lot, but not nearly enough. 

As frustrating as it was I think this style is a really good way to shake up your normal drawing routine. You’ve got to break down your reference images to the simplest but still recognizable shapes and lines, and try to include as little detail as possible while conveying your message.

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I decided to go with the theme “monsters in space” for my colouring book page. I worked on two main roughs, one of a monster who belonged in space and didn’t need a space suit, and the one you see pictured where the monster cannot breathe space air and does need a space suit.  

 I actually really like both ideas, but execution-wise the space suit idea worked a lot better. I’ve been playing with smaller thumbs for different background ideas, there could be a lot of swirling lines for detail to represent galaxies and space junk.

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Monster thumbs. A few ideas for our collaborative colouring book. I drew a few ideas that were less cute as well as many that are cute. I think illustrating detail in a more adult-orientated book would be fun, as would spookier monsters, but kids monsters are always super cute and fun as well. 

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This is my first fully digital drawing, so very much an experiment for me!

One of the first things to come to mind when I think “colour” is fields of flowers. I actually really enjoyed this experiment, and the tablet I bought last year is happy to finally be of service.  

Colouring digitally and having organized layers and the ability of ctrl+Z is a very different experience. 

I plan to continue experimenting with more digital illustrations, and hope to become faster and more comfortable along the way.