Case Study

Information about the Project

My goal was to create an illustration for a book I'm writing. It features the main character, Sherman, meeting a secondary character named Flurry. Flurry is a literal snow angel, and when Sherman meets her she has replaced his reflect in a lake that is frozen despite it being summertime. The focus of the scene is the characters. I took a lot of care in making sure Sherman and Flurry looked consistent to their appearances in other illustrations I have made for the book so far.

Even though a lot of care was put into the designs and consistency of the characters, I spent the most time working on the background. This illustration lead to me mapping out the lake area for the first time, despite it being a recurring setting in the book. A lot of thought was put into the colors that indicated depth, as well as where the beams of light would be and whether or not flowers would grow there. I also had to make sure that the background held the same consistency to the other illustrations, much like I did with the characters.

Information about the Goal

My goal was to create an illustration for a book I'm writing. The requirements were that the illustration needed to depict a scene from the chapter I had chosen- in this case, the main character meeting an angel that used his own reflection to talk to him -and it had to fit the page size requirements. While I had the advantage of being the author, depicting the scene still required cross-referencing with what I had written. I wanted the illustation to be faithful to the writing, so I carefully read the passage multiple times to make sure that all the mentioned details in the text were in the illustration.

Meeting the page requirements was easier. I used the file menu of google docs to see the size of the paper I had written my draft on. Then, I created the illustration with those dimentions. The original file is a vector, so I can always resize it as needed should the page requirement size change without worrying about the image becoming pixelated or blurry.

In-Progress Stage

When I started this illustration, I started on paper with a pencil. It took a few iterations and a lot of rereading my own work, but I settled on a design I liked. This was the stage where I focused a lot on mapping out the background. The sketches themselves were quick and messy, used as a way to get my ideas out there, but it was played a big role on determining where everything was going to go and what exactly would go in the background. The bushes and trees were required, as they were mentioned in the chapter, but the flowers and beams of light were included to evoke a sense that the forest the characters are in is lively and growing.

The next stage of my process was to redraw the scene in Adobe Illustrator as a final rough draft. The placement of the characters, horizon line, and background features were a lot more deliberate in this draft. There was also a larger focus in making sure the characters were completely faithful to their original designs. Precision was key in this stage of the design.

For the final iteration of the illustration, I refined the lines using Illustrator's pen tool. The goal here was to lock-in details and sharpen lines. The image became clean and the details were refined. This was also the stage in which I chose the colors of everything. This involved referencing the other colors I had used in other illustrations. Since this was the first illustration that Flurry was in, it was also when I locked-in her color scheme that was going to be used in the rest of the illustrations she was in.