Wooden hands

I got a short notice illus­tra­tion job this week for images for Christ­mas greet­ings from Buil­dopia, an Itali­an eco-build­ing company. They special­ise in wood and their slogan trans­lates as “the build­ing game”. So here’s some wooden hands present­ing wooden baubles, on wrap­ping paper featur­ing a house they built.

The illus­tra­tion is actu­ally three differ­ent line draw­ings done with Posca mark­er. The house, the hand and the bauble. (I actu­ally drew anoth­er hand with the back of the palm up too, but ended up not using it). I happened to actu­ally already have a draw­ing of a hand hold­ing a sphere in my sketch­book, which was very useful for refer­ence- you can see it here in some sketches I did of a magi­cian enter­tain­ing kids. I scan the ink draw­ings, clean them up in Photoshop, then import to Illus­trat­or and auto­trace and turn into live­paint to make sure they have a completely clean line and trans­par­ent back­ground, before being returned to Photoshop for colour­ing and texture.

Each layer is set as a multiply layer on Photoshop, with a texture from some recycled paper I scanned, and extra multiply layers at around 70% opacity for any colours. I then created a repeat pattern of the houses using the offset tool, and laid it down in the back­ground over a green-toned version of the recycled paper texture. Then the items are layered up, with each layer given a drop shad­ow. The hands are actu­ally copied three times each to give the shad­ows more depth. So there’s actu­ally about twelve differ­ent photoshop layers going on in this illus­tra­tion.