#festival poster

The process for cloud city followed a very typical path for creating a complex illustration. This is my process which may or may not work for everyone. 

Step 1 - The Problem - All projects need to start somewhere, usually the answer to problem or question that has been asked. Cloud City was the solution to my problem of wanting a highly detailed illustration that could be sold on a poster in my Gumroad shop.

Step 2 Inspiration and the solution - I sat down and wrote down as many ideas as I could that I thought I could create a highly detailed illustration out of. Some of these other ideas may become posters later on. Cloud City was formed when I closed my eyes and saw a city in the clouds. Why this happened I’m not sure but nonetheless I saw great potential with this idea.

Step 3 Sketching - I took my pencil to paper and began to sketch out what I thought the city would look like. I sketched and shaded how I thought the clouds should look and began to get my ideas written down/sketched out. 

Step 4 Review - My initial drawing for the city actually had the city as a bustling major city, a Los Angeles in the sky so to speak. But as I sat there and thought through my idea for the millionth time, I realized I wanted to do a city that was much more provincial.

Step 5 - Research - I began to research different buildings, different art directions, and various ways clouds are shaded. I took great inspiration in Santorini for the windmill, ancient greek architecture for the government buildings, a church not to far from me for the church I created here.

Step 6 - Illustration - I began by creating clouds. I tried many different ways of shading them and to be honest this took a long time and a couple days before I got them too look the way they do now. When I sketch my ideas out, I like to keep everything loose and not very detailed. I do this because I know that I will probably change things when I get into Illustrator. The clouds took a lot of trial and error to get right, and looked different than how I initially imagined them to look. After the clouds were finalized I created the church. Creating the church allowed me to set an art style for all the buildings. This included how the highlights and shadows were to be done, what colors I was going to use, and how big each building needed to be. With the church complete, I settled on the final color scheme, allowing me to work with consistency the rest of the way.  From there I created the rest of the buildings, clouds, starts, and air ships you see. As I created different objects, I continually moved other objects around, to make sure the layout was maximized. 

As you can see, the process for creating this illustration took a bit of time, but in the end was well worth the effort. If you have any questions or comments please let me know. And for more images of other details of the beginnings of this project, check out my post about Cloud City on my Behance. Thank you!