Digital Illustration - Alliums with Blue Petal Sky

In my effort to start getting to grips with creating illustrations using Photoshop, I tasked myself today with getting to know the Photoshop brush tools. I just spent a couple of hours playing around with different brushes in different sizes, colours and strengths.

To start with, my marks resembled those of a 2 year old learning to hold a pencil. But slowly, I began to get an idea of the different textures Photoshop had to offer and felt more comfortable with the digital pen. I made some pretty background textures for use in future projects.  These were some of my favourite:

It's actually a good warm-up drawing exercise to draw very simple shapes and patterns, since the left side of your brain gets bored, leaving you open to the creativity that comes from activating the right brain (for more on this, see this post)

Point in case, before I knew it, I was drawing a circle pattern with one of the funky fluffy brushes and suddenly it transformed into this little illustration of Alliums with Blue Petal Sky.

It must be my subconscious looking forward to spring, amidst all the snow we have here at the moment!

My first ever digital illustration - "The Swan"

In order to get the most out of my Illustration course over the next year, I'm going to have to get to grips with digital illustration. So I opened up the (never used) Illustrator application that I had with my Photoshop software and watched some of the video tutorials. It all seems pretty complicated right now compared with just wielding a pen or brush - there is soooo much to learn! I'm sure I'll get the hang of it eventually (and it will help when I get a tablet and pen to draw with instead of the mouse!), but here's my first attempt (inspired by my Winter canal walk photos). Hopefully I can look back in a few months and see a vast improvement!