Digital Illustration - Textures & Collage

I thought it would be fun to share some of the process of a recent piece I created called Turning Japanese.  It's a small collection of matching tableware designed with digital papers I created so the piece would be cohesive.  ​The finished piece is seen here. 

The image below shows a random sampling of some of the textures I created for this piece.  They range from dots to parallel lines to cross hatching.  There are areas where their overlap can be seen and a new texture is formed. When working digitally, I can also alter the layer mode which changes an element based on what's behind it.  An example of this is how the dots on the left are yellow.  They turn yellow because of the background color they are on, but it's actually the same texture as the black dots on the right. 

The image below shows one of my favorite types of textures to create, acrylic paints on magazine pages.  By using existing pages, I have the benefit of whatever colors, textures and text may be on them straight from the magazine.  After adding paint I move it around with a brush, a fork, an old credit card, anything to get interesting shapes  and lines happening.  I get bursts of colos as they drag and mix through one another.  Sometimes I press another page on top and then peel it back again.  This removes some of the paint and often leaves some paper behind giving a reverse image.

Lastly I will share some stages during creation of the tableware piece.  Side by side you can see how the textures created on the left are pulled and layered into the shapes on the right.  The teapot shape is first sketched and filled with solid color.  Then I choose the positioning of a chunk of the magazine page.  The bowl progression shows the general shape design and then the cropping and layering of addition papers to that element.

I hope this has been an interesting little peek into my digital collage process.  This art piece was kept pretty flat.  Usually I go in after filling in the textures and start playing with shapes to add highlights and shadows, but I wanted this one to be very simple. 

I enjoy having the freedom to create my own textures and not be limited by only the physical papers I may have on hand as with an analog collage.  Having endless digital combinations isn't always a great thing though.  With so much freedom to tweak and reposition things, it can be hard to decide which version I like the best.  There have been plenty of times where I've worked on a piece for awhile with it looking one way and then I end up changing something major and liking that version better.  it's then and only then when my artistic eye is satisfied and I know a piece is truly finished.

Thanks for letting my share some of my process with you. :)
​Lisa