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Sink or Swim.

MARCH 21, 2012

Asset International: Interest Rates Rising. Sink or Swim. Another illustration for SooJin, this one about surviving the impending European economic fall-out. I thought I would post this one as a simple tutorial on building an illustration in Photoshop. The thumbnails are all pretty straightforward. With a few of them I was trying to figure out a way to bring something in that would identify with Europe, but SooJin didn't think that it was important. She picks no.18, but says it's only showing the sinking scenario, and to have in the distance a boat that's survived the "interest storm." Adjust for the wider layout and shoot a sketch off and wait for approval.

She gets back to me quickly and i transfer this sketch down to a board and airbrush the ship and man on the bow...The next step is to sort of get a handle on the pallet. the last one I did for SooJin was in a neutral color pallet, and looking at the subject matter, thought this one worked leaning that way as well.


Let's start with grey...Block in flat colors to set the tone and mood of the piece.

add some gradients

Add the islands and simple reflections. Keeping it fairly simple...

Adding some clouds and starting on some reflections in the water.I darkened the edges to make it a bit moodier.

More detail. ropes and more layers of clouds...and a reflection of the boat..these are real simple just copy the layer and flop them over in transform adjust the transparency and mask them so it's not too even.
Then a few final tweaks... Not trying to make this too simple...

 Done then shoot off a low rez for approval and upload the high rez and you're done....And there you have it, and there it this....Not trying to over simplify the illustration but building a neutral color pallet off a grey back ground is just one way of working with the color. Certainly there are a host of others. The neutrals seemed to work well with this one because of the "after the storm" concept...But you get the Idea...
Topical: JUST WORK  THE LAB  
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