CREATE A FANTASY ILLUSTRATION

Twin artists Raide and Leffie reveal how they collaborated on this delightful scene inspired by their childhood art

- Raide and Leffie

Together we collaborated on this project, and in this workshop we’ll take you through our steps, from the initial ideas to the final edits. In this guide, you’ll discover how we created a fantasy illustration featuring an enchanted owl tree.

This project was inspired by our childhood artworks: we used to draw owls with matching presents on a large, magical tree. We recently found one of these older drawings and decided it’d be a nice idea to tackle this concept again. The drawing was supposed to be very whimsical, so lighting played an important role. We will demonstrate which blend modes we use to create the enchanting lighting effects, and explain how we created unique character designs for the owls and their matching presents.

1 The idea and moodboard

For a children’s book project we needed to create a populated forest scene. Browsing through our legacy sketch collections, recurring subjects were owls guarding their individual presents. We collaborated to expand these characters and developed them to bring the forest scene to life. After we have formed a general idea, we like to put together a moodboard. In this case, we saved inspirational images of forest concept artworks, photography and owl designs in a Pinterest board.

2 Thumbnail sketches

Based on those images, we created a series of small and quick drawings. We picked our favourite ones and used them as a guide to create a compositional sketch.

3 Colour key – colour scheme and lighting