Today I will offer one interesting tool for work, which I personally learned about a year ago while taking an illustration course. To begin, we will cut out an arbitrary small-sized character from thick cardboard. The pose can be any, as you wish. Where the character's feet meet the floor, I left a rectangular base. When bent, it will allow the figurine to stand on the surface.
the process of creating a character from hard cardboard
Now we need your imagination and lighting devices that you have at home or in the office. Place your character in different locations, highlight him from the front, below, behind, or however you like. Use directional or diffuse lighting, Christmas tree garlands, hand-held lanterns, glass containers that beautifully refract light, transparent colored plastic, etc.
I used directional and diffused light, the backlight effect and colored flashlights
Here's what I got. My inspiration was so great and unstoppable, so I took a few more pictures. Here's the results
The process of creating "Cat with the halo"
I really like these shots, especially the cat with the halo, and I will definitely use them in future works
the results of my experiments with lighting and location
One of the compositions fully corresponded to my ideas, so I started working on the illustration. I created a sketch, agreed on it with the curator and started drawing.
based on this photo I made a sketch and started working on the illustration
After several hours of work and a couple of rounds of edits from my curator, the illustration was ready.
Mock-up designed by yeven_popov / Freepik, rawpixel.com / Freepik
I hope you find this technique useful and may be use it for one of your future projects!
Thank you for your attention! Have a nice day!
