Thursday, August 19, 2010

1971 - finished illustration



This illustration is inspired by a photo of my uncle Jonathan with one of his motorcycles in 1971. I found the photo at my grandmother's house and was immediately reminded of famous images of motorcycles with movie stars like James Dean and Steve McQueen. The picture was started on watercolor paper with brown colored pencil and ink washes. All color was added digitally painted in Photoshop. The final illustration measures 27" x 18" and was completed in August of 2010.

Some in progresses versions of this illustration can be seen here. You can see that the piece originally had a shorter composition but I widened it as it got closer to completion and am much happier with the final composition. This picture is one of those pieces I started a while ago and had to keep putting it on hold for various reasons. However, this piece will be on display at the New York State Fair from August 26th until September 6th, 2010, which was great motivation for finally finishing it off.

Prints of this illustration are now available through my print shop!

5 comments:

lostsailors said...

This is amazing! The process is crazy- is the texture of the colour from paint, or is that also added digitally?

Jackie Sullivan said...

Some of the texture on Uncle Jon is from the inkwash, but a lot of the texture comes from separate image files from my own texture library. My texture library is made from watercolor and ink things I've scanned, papers I've scanned, photos I've taken, and the like. I've also gotten some really great textures from cgtextures.com, some of which I used in this piece. At this point, the "Texture Library" folder on my computer is at 1.68 GB. Yay for resources!

ihadsomelagears said...
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Arielle Lee Bair said...

AWESOME.

Jackie Sullivan said...

Thanks, Arielle! :)