Starting off the new year with a few quick and dirty pieces and one larger one.

Let's start with the larger piece first.

I built this nature scene over the course of a couple days with basically no planning or prep, as is often the case with my small projects.

While I was browsing through Netflix, I saw an image of the sun shining through a natural tunnel of trees and grass. It was beautiful, so I decided to adapt that general idea with my own illustration style. I gathered some photographic source material and work from other artists for inspiration. I arranged it all around my Illustrator art board, making a little inspiration frame. Without knowing exactly what I wanted to do, I set about just making the trees first, since they were the clearest objects in my mind. Then I worked on the fore ground, middle ground and back ground separation and little ways to integrate the trees into the environment.

After about four hours working on it, I went to bed with the piece in this state.

Looking back on it now, it looks rough and bleak when compared to how the piece turned out. Honestly, it looks like a post-nuclear wasteland. Weirdly enough, in my mind, at 2 AM when I was wrapping this up, I was convinced it was vibrant and alive.

I picked it up the next day and set about really nailing the detail and the palette. I ended up working on it on and off for most of my free time that day. I changed the palette a number of times, working my way from deep brown and yellow to a de saturated pink, tan and creme. By the end of the day, I ended up with this.

After working on it for so many hours in such a short amount of time, I was getting to that point where no matter what angle or scale I viewed it at, I was convinced it was a big pile of poop.

A few hours of hanging with my roommates and watching terribly documentaries about conspiracy theories thankfully reset my brain enough to resume work. I finished off the day with an other three or four hours of work in time to post it here.

The final here is not really final. I have a few big issues I haven't been able to resolve yet. I don't know exactly what I want to do with that window above the sun. I filled it with this streak of birds that is supposed to draw the eye up and right, but I don't know if it does enough to give the sky a full look. As you can see in the second export, I spent a good long while adding in leaves floating on the wind. I kept this feature in for much of the design process today, but ultimately removed it because I couldn't get the leaves to look enough like leaves and not just like miscellaneous debris. I'd love to come back to that concept and include it again. I also can't figure out exactly how to work shadows and highlights into the piece without ruining the terrain work. I'd love to really show the sun's affect on the trees, especially, but haven't found a solve for how to integrate it yet.

Other smaller projects that I've finished this week include:

1. A little logo that I imagine is for a sci-fi fleet command.

2. A flag for an inter-planetary confederation of some sort.

3. A minimalist, isometric city.

That's pretty much it for this week! I'm excited to work a bit more on the details of the pink forest piece, but I think I'll give it a rest for at least a week to let myself re-approach it with a fresh set of eyes. As for the others: I might revisit the sci-fi fleet logo, but I'll likely leave the other two alone. Knowing myself, I will be making a lot more sci-fi flags and cityscapes in the future, so these were good practice.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!