new ways with colour & light
Given a brief to create a bright and charming illustration for this month’s cover, Maria Poliakova paints a portrait of a young girl in vibrant colours
I really like working in colour, whether it’s in Photoshop or painting traditionally with watercolours. Vibrant colour will often make an illustration more decorative, but there’s also a danger of it becoming flat. However, you can counteract this by adding a sense of volume in the right places throughout the composition.
When creating personal work, I’ll often start with colour blotted above a rough sketch. Then I’ll sculpt form with colour and strokes, and overlap layers of different colours on top of each other. It’s easy to experiment when you’re working digitally!
For inspiration I often study classic artists. You can learn a lot from them, such as how to guide the viewer’s eye with help of the light, shadows and colour. I particularly like the art of Klimt, Mucha and Van Gogh. Klimt was able to capture a strong sense of character and nature with brush strokes and colours. I adore Mucha’s line art. He depicted feminine beauty perfectly, and had an eye for decorative details, brilliant composition and gorgeous colours. And Van Gogh was just a genius.
1 Design illustration phase
The first thing I do before starting an illustration is to browse through my folder of inspiration. Inside are plenty of sub-folders, containing images of lighting, faces, human figures, clothing, illustrations from favourite artists, animals, caterpillars, flowers and plenty more besides. I quickly look through some folders, keeping in mind my theme or work brief. I notice what makes a particular image look good, what emotion it brings out in me, or what’s actually beautiful in it. My own idea comes from studying these images. When working with colour the most inspiring thing is nature: flowers, butterflies, caterpillars, especially tropical species.
2 Produce a rough sketch
Next, I need to visualise my idea, so I produce a series of small sketches, which are made up of flowing lines. This acts as both a warm-up exercise and a way of focusing on the task in hand. After I’ve finished drawing, I narrow down the options and continue to refine them, until the best one is ready to be used as a base.