Final Project for course: Vector Illustration for Vibrant Compositions

In this project, I chose a place near and dear to me - where I live: Austin, Texas.

This exercise is all about creating many illustrations and then combining them into one large composition. Part postcard, part love letter.

I start with brainstorming the reasons I love the place and things I associate with it, and then sketch out my ideas with Procreate on my iPad.

I then bring my sketches into Adobe Illustrator to create the lineart using the pen tool and simple shapes, until I have a sort of coloring book look.

After choosing a limited color palette to work with, I color everything in and add vector brushes with clipping masks for dimension and texture.

Then I use a grid in Illustrator to start laying everything out, finding creative ways for the illustrations to interact with each other and trying to keep everything cohesive. This one had a lot of illustrations so it took a while to get to something I was happy with and could print out to hang in my home.

The beauty of this exercise is I can then break off the individual illustrations again and use them for other things - like creating stickers out of them.

This exercise could also be completed with more traditional tools - like Posca paint markers. This requires me having to flesh out the composition more beforehand, so I drew a rough sketch of how I wanted it to look - still following the same principles and using a grid to lay it out.

I sketched it out again on my 8x10" canvas and started to fill in the light colors first before continuing to add more and more to it until it was complete.