Colorful City Portraits: Illustrate Your Favorite Place

Ilustrated City Portrait

“We have reached the end of the course! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Before leaving I want to make a quick recap of the process I took on the way of making my illustration. First off a great place to start is by considering what makes a City Portrait. Here we started by writing down lists and potential ideas of what we might want to include in our portraits. Then we saved images and photos of the places to draw so that we had something to reference and guide us through the process. I shared with you some of my materials and that I most frequently work with. But remember this is personal preference and you can choose to use whatever materials you prefer. Be bold and experiment, this is an opportunity. Next, we made a start on turning our ideas into real drawings. We did this by sketching out thumbnails and developing these into a rough. Remember you can always create some pencil textures like I did, and bring this and the rough into digital form using a scanner.

Next, we optimised the rough and started drawing the colour version using the rough as a guide. This is where I showed you the layer-based approach that works well with Photoshop and other image programs. The benefit of this technique is that it allows you to colour and change things as you go until you’re happy with the result. I love this way of working because it allows you a level of spontaneity and freedom. Finally, we refine the image with some final touches. Here you can play with typography and add elements such as people to your image. You can also tweak sizing and even implement layout changes. Remember that while I’m showing you my techniques and a bit about my style, the important thing is you will be working the way you’d like to. Everyone has a different way of drawing, and you can bring your personal touch to this project, and hopefully the combination of this, and following my process, will help every project look unique It’ll also be great to see all the different places people choose to illustrate: I’m expecting almost all of these to be unique, especially if we’re seeing hometowns from all over the world. Some of you may choose a famous city and we’ll have multiple takes of that, but that will be interesting too! The forum is a great place to discuss and help each other with projects. There may be varying experience levels so it’d be brilliant to see those of you with answers to questions helping out. I’m excited to see what you all come up with. Please share it with me in your Final Project entry, and if you feel like sharing it on social media, please tag us @alexfosterillustration @domestika Also, you can use #AlexFosterDomestika #portraitofacity so I can keep track of all your work. Please remember that I am a full-time freelance illustrator so will always be working on client work, but I’ll try to respond in the forums myself as much as I can. ”

Partial transcription of the video

“Final Project We've reached the end of this Domestika course. It's been a pleasure and I hope you've enjoyed what I've shared with you. Remember to have fun with the process of creating your own city portraits. It can be meaningful to capture the essence of a place in your city portrait. By following the lessons, you can see how easy it is to create your illustrated city portrait. Be original when uploading your final projects and show me your vision in your illustrated city portrait. Start by saving your own images for your mood board and then you can create thumbnails and a rough based on...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Colorful City Portraits: Illustrate Your Favorite Place

• Level: Beginner
• 99% positive reviews (102)
• 2369 students
• 4 units
• 13 lessons (2h 21m)
• 1 download

• Category

  Illustration

• Areas

  Digital Illustration, Digital Painting, Drawing, Infographics, Traditional illustration