Hey everyone, I know I haven't posted here in quite awhile, but if you follow me on any of my other social media platforms you'll see I've been anything but quiet!
Two weeks ago I was commissioned by the Asheville Parks and Rec Department to create an ink illustration of the Shiloh Community Garden. This illustration would be used as a page in a community garden coloring book.
The process turned out to be much more involved than I'd assumed. The first thing I did was take a walk over to the community garden which happened to be only a few streets down the road from where I live. I spent an afternoon there taking countless reference photos of all of the specific plants, structures and general layout of the area. It's a beautiful little spot and I appreciated taking time to really get acquainted with the land and the vegetation. Once I had my collection of photos it was time to choose an angle for the composition itself. I specifically wanted to actually depict the area. What I ended up doing was compositing two photos together because I was having trouble finding an angle that would allow me to show as much of the plant life as possible.
After putting the photos together in procreate on my Ipad, I traced the various perspective lines and structures and then carefully rearranged the things so that a consistent perspective could be created. The warping and changing of the objects that I had to do in order to make everything align with the perspective caused the drawing to be twisted up and wrong, so what I did then was spend time actually redrawing each piece to make it correct.
As I was drawing in some of the bushier vegetation it occurred to me that a simplification of such a complex mess of roots and branches would make it easier for for people to actually enjoy coloring the page when it was done. I decided to take a slightly more abstract approach with textures and chaotic line work.
Due to short timeline of the project I drew the original draft on my Ipad so that I could go a bit quicker in establishing the whole piece. The first milestone of this project was to get your draft approved by the first deadline. After I'd had my digital sketch approved, I set up the digital sketch with a grid.
I'd made the digital canvas in procreate to the dimensions of 18" by 24" so that when I got the sketch approved I would be able to make a grid on the digital canvas to directly match the aspect ratio of the sheet of paper I planned on using.
From there I drew it out the final sketch in pencil and used my light table to trace the final sketch on to the next piece of paper that I planned on using for the final inking.
I then began using my new logitech webcam to record the inking process. I have currently posted two of the time lapses on my instagram and facebook pages and I'll be posting one more ink time lapse before creating a mega compilation on my Youtube channel.
You can see the time lapses at
Once I had completed the final inking I brought the poster over to fedex for the digitization on their over-sized scanner, Unfortunately you always are gambling with quality when you use a public scanner. The scanner was kind of dirty and the settings were off so I had to take the file home and spend the rest of the day cleaning up all of the lines and digital debris from the scanner.
At this point the deadline was the next day and while I was formatting the file for printing, I realized that the aspect ratio I had used on the final inking was very slightly different from the required dimensions of the coloring book page. After I resized the file accordingly I had a border because the resizing didn't match up. So what i ended up doing was adding some digitally drawn extensions to the drawing so that it would more completely fill the empty space of the page.
The printing is currently being done and I'll post ordering info if anyone is interested in procuring a copy!