I am currently taking an online course in illustration, which is very exciting. It is based on assignments that are turned in first to the othter students for commenting and then to the teacher for comments and grades after changes have been made. The first assignment was to illustrate the month of April for a fictive calender printed by the city Malmö, Sweden. As I have been there only once, I had to rely on Google to provide me some inspiration. After trying some different subjects and styles I settled for the above watercolor/ink motive of the bridge between Sweden and Denmark along with some spring flowers and birds. In the background, hardly visible, is the wind farm Lillgrund. I wanted it to be a bigger part of the composition first, but I could not really fit it in. Below are some other ideas I was working on, in a very different style.
This is a famous building in Malmö (Turning Torso) along with some typical spring attributes. It was a quick sketch on paper, which I added some color to and then added the background in Photoshop. I don´t think it turned out so good though - I would have wanted to do something funny with the backhround working with textures, but I am still struggeling to learn the basics of PS. I realised it would have been easier to work with if I hadn´t added the color so I did an experiment....
...with the above linedrawing which I scanned and colored in Photoshop. I think one could do something more interesting to background and colors here as well with a bit more PS-skill... For comparison, below is the same drawing, but hand colored. It´s the same one in two versions, to demonstrate another problem that I constantly have: the first one is a photo, which makes it too grey and ugly. The second one is scanned, which makes all the light colors dissapear. Any tips as how to solve either of these problems would make me insanely happy....
