Blog illustration

A little aside now on that picture from the Romanticism post below. I took the rather unusual step of making an illustration to fit a blog post. I was in a rut with other things creatively at the time, and that seemed to be what I needed to do; it won't happen too often (any further ballooning of the huge amount of work I still have to do for this project is to be definitely avoided). Actually, I made three different possible illustrations, all along a similiar theme. The one I chose was a bit of an experiment that I might take further at some point in the future. It is not, as it might first appear, either a doctored photograph or a hyperrealistic drawing, but a combination of digital painting and digital collage; it's actually made from about ten different photographs of trees and wooded areas, mixed together and overpainted. I came at the idea whilst trying to assemble a reference image to draw from, and I think it's quite effective. A more rigorous approach, carefully cutting out sections of trees and limbs and foliage and layering them up, might be something to try another time. Below the jump are the other two, unselected, Romanticism pictures; a treated photograph with some text and a straight up fantasy woodland nightscape digital painting, which was great fun to do but doesn't have that much relevance to the issue at hand, although it might be interesting in light of the next post.