Illustration Friday, or Monday rather -- Fluid

Good morning everyone! I had a busy weekend this week so I apologize for the late post. I feel my excuse is justified though -- I became a first-time aunt on Thursday! Welcome to our family baby girl, Emerson Joy!
Last week's word was fluid; I wanted to communicate that without tacking the easy route of illustrating a liquid. Instead I focus on 'fluid' meaning elegant, graceful, not settled, and able to change.Change is beautiful isn't it? Creepy-looking caterpillars become butterflies, children become adults; change allows us to reach great heights.

The artist that I took my inspiration from for this piece is Nick Hufford. The objects in this are the only things defining space. They aren't placed in a setting, the create the setting. They aren't placed in front of a background, elements of a traditional background are general shapes forming around the focal points (ie: the single cloud behind the building, or the water below the gondola not flowing past the length of it.)

Here are the concepts I generated. Again, I didn't want to take an easy route and use water as my focus, but the idea had crossed my mind so I jotted a few of those concepts down too to get them out of my system. I chose to develop the bottom left concept with the kite.

I transfered my template onto watercolour paper. *Clever moment -- I used a 'fluid' medium to create this piece! I started by sketching my elements lightly with a brown watercolour pencil. I then laid a wet-wash over the whole thing using Orange Peeko Tea.

I let the wash dry then in the areas that I wanted to stand apart from the background I added more tea simply by painting it over those areas.

Next, to add detail to the kite I used brown watercolour pencils.

I then scanned my painting into my computer on a flatbed scanner and began making edits in photoshop.

Next, I brought my edited image into InDesign to clean-up the edges and add the word 'Fluid'.

This piece was a lot of fun to create, and now I'm back on track to do this week's Illustration Friday. It's going to be a tricky one; the word is Capable.