Strombitia

Strombitia

Hello @s !

I present a new personal project in which I incorporate different elements from my imagination. It's an old idea in which a utopian place, like a giant seashell, would serve as a refuge.
to those who flee their homeland, crossing the Mediterranean in search of a more hopeful future. Strombitia refers to that fictional non-place whose term comes from the scientific root "strombidae," the name by which sea snails are classified.

I'm going to present the most important phases of the process, carried out traditionally in the first part, and digitally in the color part thanks to an XP-Pen 22" together with Photoshop.

Preliminary sketch and drawing

I always use a 2B pencil and a Pentel Graphgear 1000 as traditional tools. In the first part of the process, I start by testing out some ideas and making small preliminary sketches on a quarter of a sheet of paper to find the composition I'm most comfortable with. After this, I can create a final sketch on a regular A4 sheet of paper without going into too much detail.

At that point I scan it and convert it into yellow pencils to enlarge it, I print it in A3 size on Bristol paper and redraw everything with more detail (it helps later in the line inking phase).

Inking

Once I have the final pencil drawing, I scan it again and convert it to blue pencils to print it again on another A3 Bristol paper. Here, if necessary, I add nuances with a Prismacolor blue pencil and then ink over it. For this illustration, I used a Sakura Micron size 05 and a brush to fill in the few black areas.
With the ink finished I scan once more, clean up slightly in Photoshop and move on to color.

Color

I'm thinking of a palette of vibrant, exotic colors. I wasn't going for a dramatic effect, so I looked to Post-Impressionist painting and Gauguin's application of color. I place the main tones in the first base layers (skin, clothing, surface and shell, sea and sky), and on top of each, I add secondary layers, highlighting what interests me. In this example, I didn't add too many because I was looking for a simple, flat color look, without excessive shadows or highlights.

Finally, I add some layered effects and balance the color before calling the illustration finished.

Without further ado, I hope that some of the process can be helpful to you and that we continue learning.
Thank you very much and greetings!