Some randoms from the other night.

A quickie

Something quick for briarpatch magazine about how Afghani and Indigenous women are perceived in the media.

Thanks to Shayna Stock for this one!

More old timey folks

Here is some more work I did for the Parks Canada project.
There was a lot of back and forth on these, so I thought it might be interesting to post some process sketches.

For the project as a whole, the art directors wanted the images to stick pretty tightly to the reference images provided. As someone who primarily does more conceptual illustration, it was a constant temptation to stray away from the material provided and add my own spin on things.
It took several rounds of revisions for each set of images, but in the end we did find something that made us all happy.
For some projects you get hired to do your thing, for others more so to provide a service.
This project was a bit more of the latter, but that made it all the more challenging and rewarding in the end.

Thanks to all the fine folks over at Parks Canada for this one!

Old timey Folks

Here are some more images from the same project.
I had about a day to do each one, so it was a fun chance to experiment with graphite and its many applications.

Parks Canada Mural Process

Process post!, here we go!

The art directors basically wanted a scene depicting the fort, river, Village and loading dock, showing the inhabitants going about their daily business,
so I presented thumbs showing the scene from three angles.



They chose #3, which I refined...



And refined some more...



After the color comp was approved, it was pointed out that the front man would probably roll the barrel instead of carrying it.



Back to the drawing board..



After a few more tweaks I was given the go ahead to go into production.

Since I neither had the studio nor hard drive space to execute a drawing this size, I had to break it up into 30x 22 inch sections and ink them separately.






Whew!
2 bottles of ink, 15 sheets of paper, and 200 scans later...

I had the final drawing!


I spent about a day and a half flatting the entire thing, painstakingly selecting each and every shrubbery with the marquis tool.
It is probably the most tedious part of coloring digitally, but I find flatting to be one of the most valuable tricks I've learned over the years.
Not only does it cut your file size down by almost half, but it can save hours, nay, DAYS of work.



Some quick color blocking, trying to figure out how to frame the scene.



Hilights:



Some additional textures:



Some detail shots:






And the final image:



I hope you all enjoyed that!
I'll be posting some more work from the same project in the next few days.

Cheers,

-Laura

Parks Canada Mural

Hey everyone!
Sorry for the long absence, these last few months have been some of the most insanely busy, yet ultimately rewarding months of my life.
Shortly before the end of last year I was approached to redo the illustrations at the Fort Langley National Historic Site.
In addition 14 other images, I was commissioned to do a 7x 16 foot mural as a centerpiece to the fort entrance.

I normally work fairly small, so it was a technical challenge executing something this size!
All in all, it took about two months to complete.
I'll be posting a lengthy process breakdown for this image as well as some other images from the project soon!