the futur illustration webinar
Summer School 2018
I had the amazing opportunity to teach an hour-long webinar for the futur, a design education platform, on the topic of adding depth to illustration. For my webinar, I covered the importance of using scale, color and texture to create depth in your scene. I also created a custom illustration showing the process of adding those things; I'll walk you through that process below.
The starting image
I've created this beach scene, which is in a very flat style.
Scale
By changing the scale of the objects in the scene, I can lead the viewer's eyes through the picture because scale creates a clear hierarchy. You can see here that by increasing the size of the extra ball and drinks, I've focused this scene from a potentially competitive, potentially casual game of volleyball to a relaxed day at the beach, playing a game with friends.
Color
There's this principle called atmospheric perspective which says that as the distance increases between the viewer and an object, the object fades in color, taking on the color of the atmosphere and losing contrast. By doing that in my scene to the volleyball players and hills in the back, I've pushed them back and brought the foreground elements farther forward and adding a sense of realism to the scene.
Texture
Along with fading color, objects lose visible detail over greater distances. By adding texture to foreground elements, we put the final touch on our scene, which now has much more depth than the beginning version.
