This illustration was my April submission to the monthly Critique Arena challenge at svslearn.com. The prompt was "design the coolest treehouse in the world," which hands-down has to be the coolest prompt in the world, right? As a kid, I was obsessed both with treehouses in real life and with my own imagined self-sufficient dessert factories. How cool would it be to combine the two!
Once landing on the idea of a pie bakery in a fruit tree, I began by exploring rough silhouettes in my sketchbook with a fat marker. I filled pages with these blobs, digging deeper into the more interesting shapes by adding interior lines until something in me said, "this is it." I took a photo of the sketch on the right and started drawing directly on top of it in procreate.
A note on the wild scribbles and pencil stabs: no page in my sketchbook has been spared embellishment by my 1.5-year-old child
Photographing my thumbnail sketches instead of redrawing them from scratch has been my favorite method since high school, when I first noticed that I just couldn't get that same energy trying to copy something at a larger scale. This method made it a pretty quick transition from sketchy blob to fully-detailed 3D structure ready for color. You'll notice several more critters in this first sketch: I decided against including all of them since the illustration prompt was all about environmental design and I didn't want the characters to distract from the setting.
Since I love the look of limited color palettes, I always plan my palette first. I put several swatches on their own layer to sample during the coloring process, which makes coloring so much quicker. To get a warm, late-afternoon autumnal vibe, I went with rusty reds, ochres, muted greens, and a deep plum for shadows.
On this piece, I chose gouache-and-colored-pencil look. I laid the major color blocks down in gouache-style brushes, added semitransparent plum-colored shadows on top, then finished with outlines and details using pencil brushes. I enjoy working in these mediums off the computer too, and it's important to me to have the flexibility of creating art in a consistent style whether working digitally or traditionally.
Thanks for reading!
