Final Project for course: Vector Illustration for Vibrant Compositions

Howdy! For my final project, I chose a place near and dear to me - where I live: Austin, Texas. I moved here about 8 years after graduating college and it immediately felt like home. These are a few of my favorite things (notice you'll find no references to traffic...)

This exercise is all about creating many illustrations and then combining them into one large composition. Part postcard, part personal love letter. After brainstorming and sketching ideas, I rendered them in illustrator before putting all the pieces together.

Though I completed mine in Adobe Illustrator, you certainly don't have to! I did a version with Posca paint markers on canvas to share how you can do it with traditional mediums too. It just takes a bit more planning during the sketch phase!

I start with brainstorming the reasons I love the place and things I associate with it, and then sketch out my ideas with Procreate on my iPad.

I then bring my sketches into Adobe Illustrator to create the lineart using the pen tool and simple shapes, until I have a sort of coloring book look.

After choosing a limited color palette to work with, I color everything in and add vector brushes with clipping masks for dimension and texture.

Then I use a grid in Illustrator to start laying everything out, finding creative ways for the illustrations to interact with each other and trying to keep everything cohesive. This one had a lot of illustrations so it took a while to get to something I was happy with and could print out to hang in my home.

The beauty of this exercise is I can then break off the individual illustrations again and use them for other things - like creating stickers out of them.

This exercise could also be completed with more traditional tools - like Posca paint markers. This requires me having to flesh out the composition more beforehand, so I drew a rough sketch of how I wanted it to look - still following the same principles and using a grid to lay it out.

I sketched it out again on my 8x10" canvas and started to fill in the light colors first before continuing to add more and more to it until it was complete.