R27.CREATIVELAB / Blogspot

I'm really happy to introduce Patrik Carlsson aka Piktografika with his first of many articles on R27. I enjoy his style of illustration and enthusiasm hence very happy for him to contribute here. Read and Enjoy.

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My name is Patrik Carlsson but I'm probably better known as Piktografika. I'm a freelance illustrator from Sweden and I've been invited to this blog to show you how I made one of my more recent illustrations.

This is not a tutorial or a step by step feature where I'll try to teach you some clever photoshop techniques. What I've contributed is more of a simple behind the scenes/ have a look in my sketchbook kind of thing.

Some background on this picture: I got invited to participate in a project called "If I was you…" - the brainchild of illustrator Sandra Dieckmann The idea is that one illustrator each week make an illustration that shows what they would do if they were last weeks contributor. That probably sounded more complicated than it is. What it means is that I got to to make a picture based on what I would do if I was illustrator Emma Cowley.


After looking at Emma's site I wanted to base my illustration around her love of nature and the fact that owls often appear in her art. I scribbled down some ideas in my sketchbook and the one I decided to use was this: "If I was Emma, I would turn into an owl and fly to the island where the wild things grow".

I wanted the plants and wildlife in the picture to be scary but also kind of cute. I had to make lots of sketches to get the different kinds of carnivorous plants I wanted for this picture and to get the composition right. After a lot of pencil drawing I finally got a sketch that I liked. The plants got a little bit less cartoony during this process.


After that I spent some time at my light table inking the drawing and then I scanned the finished artwork at a high resolution. Opening it in Photoshop I made sure the black lines were as black as possible and that the white parts were really white.

When satisfied with the black & white drawing I started applying flat colors to it. I was trying to get a feeling of tropical rainforest flora in my choice of colour palette.


To make this into a night time scene and make the colours less garish I used a lot of different textures on the picture. Textures really brings the colours and the whole picture to life. One of the more unexpected textures I used was a close up photograph of some cotton candy and that worked really well on the leaves. I also added some gradients for the background and made the last minute decision to actually add the owl to the illustration.

After some hours of adding more textures and tweaking the colours on the different layers I thought I had the right combination of colourful wildlife and "night in the rainforest"- feeling to the illustration. And that was it!


Hope you liked this little "making of" -featurette!
You can find me on www.piktografika.se and talk to me on twitter.
See ya!