My friend is a big fan of nature, so I wanted to try and craft my artwork with a strong natural appeal. I wanted to come up with a character that would be really interesting and different. Rather than going the road of fairy or dryad, or any other countless fantasy creatures, I tried to think of a unique character and one that could sit in a tree at that. I tried to imagine what an office worker might look like if they worked in a forest. Even nature needs to keep track of it's assets, right? The blue bird is like an assistant, who bring up scrolls from storage for her to peruse.
I was really happy with how the face came out on this one. There's something I can't quite put my finger on. The main challenge here was the tree itself. As one of the largest elements in the image, just doing cell shading didn't seem appropriate. Especially since I was playing up the naturalness of the illustration, I wanted to express the texture of the tree. So it took quite a lot of playing around before I was satisfied. Textures in this style can't be too realistic, otherwise they don't fit well with the flatter parts. But hey it worked out in the end. Sorry about the lack of updates lately, I've been really hunting trying to find a job.
I'm also now a proud member of Illustrators Australia! Which is a professional body of illustrators in Australia, hopefully I'll be able to pick up some jobs through them. It's also good to be part of a larger community, so hopefully I can start making connections too. See my IA profile here.
Until next time, (note that 'next time' is not bound by any standard measure of time-space relationships).
