Illustration: Invasion

Here is an illustration about changing marketplace in today's economies. I tried to convey the message in a fantastical way, while incorporating some fun characters that were floating in my subconsciousness.


Invasion
Graphite + Vector and Digital Colour, x cm @450 dpi

The picture started with a series of thumbnails, investigating different ideas and poses. Eventually I refined the scribblings into this working drawing:




From the rough drawing, I used my trusty lightbox to help create a finished pencil drawing on nice, clean white paper. You can see I left spaces in the drawing for the circles, which I already planned to prepare in Adobe Illustrator. I like the contrast of the mathematical perfection of vectors with the human yearnings of the humble pencil and paper.




Using Corel Painter, I created a watercolour version to layer on top of the digital version. I don't oten use Painter for watercolour painting, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover how quick and effective it was.




I layered the watercolour version into the illustration file and continued working it up in Photoshop. Below you can see my flats and a colour layer with shadows and the vector elements. After combining everything, it was all finished!