My project for course: Atmospheric Painting in Procreate: From Concept to Color

So I chose Alice in Wonderland as a public domain piece to work on! I wanted to illustrate the famous Cheshire cat encounter and try and give it a mysterious and surprising feel to it.

I tried doing thumbnails digitally at first, but found it didn't work for me and did some traditionally. I ended up choosing 3 since it had the potential to have a very detailed background (I'm looking to refresh my background painting portfolio).

Here are the reference I used as inspiration for composition, design, render and the general feel I wanted to illustrate :)

Mostly found through Pinterest, I also included a bunch of artists I mentionned as inspiration in the first class (Amélie Fléchais, Victo Ngai, Heikala, etc.)

I got very inspired by Gawki's illustration (at the top and center) and referenced it a bunch, especially in terms of busy-ness and detail.

Here are my initial sketch and my final sketch. I asked some friends and peers to give me feedback on composition since I thought there was something not right at first.

I used a bunch of diagonals and radial lines in my final one and was pretty confident with it :)
I tried making it as detailed and filled as possible

Also, I didn't do lineart because I wanted my final illustration to have a lineless render.

Here's the colorkey I did. I made only one because I pretty much knew that I wanted to work with pink (since I don't work a lot with it) and have an analogous palette.

I tweak it a bunch, and ended up not changing it much in the final render and only changing levels a bit and saturation.

I tried saving a bunch of wips to show my process from blocking to final render to see what would change and I think it's very interesting! A lot of things stayed the same but I think you can tell what I had a hard time with hahaha

As of now, I think I'll leave it at that as the final illustration. I'm satisfied with 90% of the image, but I think the foreground, and mostly the tree on the right, is a bit blurry and muddy? I don't know how to explain and I spent a lot of time trying to solve this without succeeding all the way.

I'm open to criticism! I can still modify this a bit, but I won't do major changes since I want to try and start new projects :)

Thank you for this class, it was a blast!! @jdebbiel