Illustration – Part of the final assignment for the Illustration course. The concept was to create an illustrated standee for an artist’s event which included a portrait of the artist himself!
This design was part of my illustration course during my undergraduate, mentored by Shariq Chapra. I was to design an illustration which was to be applied as a standee design for a tribute exhibition of the works of Salvador Dali. The final product I aimed for was a {illusion of a} portrait of Salvador Dali, created through a carefully composed landscape illustration.
As a first step, I begun by researching Dali’s surrealist paintings, with a special focus to the series of portrait paintings which had created and were on a similar theme to what I was aiming for. They very in essence paintings of landscapes, but the element composition was such as to hint the audience of an illusion of a face. These were incredibly detailed and each of the creations were masterpieces of their own realms.
To get anywhere with my design, I than begun to note similarities of composition and the frameworks which made the paintings. Then began to draft visuals of tentative landscape elements over one of his most iconic portrait. This indeed gave a me a quick hints as to the execution style I should adapt and what elements would be suitable to go with the theme.
The first phase of execution begun by creating the core elements in illustrator, which included the huts/shacks and the kiln. After going through quite a few options of rural shack images, finalized a few and give each of them a shot. Adapted the best elements from each of the versions I had, and by the end of this stage had the basic composition of the landscape and the elements.
ArtRage came to play after Illustrator, exporting the visuals to it and begun adding layers of details and contrast strokes. This not only added value to the look of the illustration but allowed me to emphasize on the features of the face of Dali which I wanted to focus over. Finally what was left was to add text and final touches to the illustration and I was done! If you’d like to know more or have any comments regarding this, please don’t hesitate to contact me here.