The last illustration I finished was the Unit 9 Scene 3 illustration.
Scene Description:
Oleg and Polina are at an apiary. Both are wearing those big hats with nets and watching how a beekeeper opens a hive.
To start, I created a rough composition in Photoshop like so:
After getting approval for the composition and making minor tweaks (such as zooming in slightly in order to get rid of some of the empty space in the scene), I began lining the illustration. I thought giving Polina and Oleg matching hats would be very cute and fitting!
I traced over the beekeeper and boxes and started coloring in the box panels that hold the bees in order to get a feel for what colors the drawers should be…
After blocking in colors, I thought about adding some bees flying around in order to create interest and context for the illustration. I also painted in clusters of bees to make it a little more realistic.
I added nets over their hats and a tree in the background in an attempt to fill up some of the empty space in the illustration. The tree is a linden tree — this way we can tie together two illustrations involving bees as the other involves Polina and Oleg inspecting a linden tree branch.
We felt that the tree needed a little more detail, so I tried to shade the leaves a little more… I also added some more individual blades of grass to tie the colors together more.
I ended up redrawing the tree to make it a little more realistic and called it done!
