Research Blog 2: Cooper's Poster

For my boyfriend’s 25th birthday, I wanted to make him something meaningful, fun, yet personal. I personally love art that brings an exciting and interesting color pallet and wanted to test my digital illustration skills. I started with a picture I took of my boyfriend and his bike on the edge of a river, mountains in the distance. We took a trip to the mountains and found the coolest camp spot, so it was a really nice moment to capture. I threw the image in procreate and did a quick outline of the shapes. After I put this in illustrator and started layering color shaped ranging from dark to lighter shades, using a posterized black and white version of the original picture as a reference. Once I got all the shapes drawn with the pen tool, I started to color. I played around with a lot of color schemes before settling on the orange/teal variation. I enjoyed watching how the feel of the piece changed so drastically depending on the colors I used, and with help from Ike, was able to recolor faster and easier and explore lots of color combinations. After I chose these colors, my mom told me they were often aligned with the environment and adventure, so I think the colors ended up being perfect. After printing (and reprinting) the poster, I found a frame at Goodwill that fit it well (enough). He loved it and hung it on his wall. I look forward to playing with more digital illustration tools and making more personal pieces for the people in my life.

Click on the images below to see WIP and final product.