Creating an illustration for Halloween

As I mentioned in my previous post, I love the autumn season and the darkness of Halloween. For this year I started with a watercolour from a skull and now I’ve created an illustration.

Process of creating the illustration

I started off by using Illustrator. I sketched a photograph I had taken from the Necropolis in Glasgow, UK to serve as the landscape of a cemetery. Vector shapes were created using the pen tool. The main subject was created from a self portrait, which I also had sketched it as a template. Transforming it into a vector was easy by using the pencil tool. Once all the elements were vectors, I blocked them with the colours I wanted for my scene.

My next step was to add textures and gradients in photoshop, using watercolour, gouache, leaves, grass and grainy brushes. The sky was created with a two pastel colours gradient and for the general image a foreground to transparent gradient to give dimension to the image.

Story behind the illustration for Halloween

Have you already seen me creating an illustration or composite without a story behind?

It was a calm dusk of an autumn dry day. The leaves were turning more orange and red and had started to fall. The moon hadn’t risen long ago and as soon as it was higher up in the sky, it had a passer-by, a witch on her broom! It was a welcome, a call for the dead! Not long after and not too close to the graveyard, a dead soul resurfaced from the soil across the path, underneath the trees. The dead seemed not to want the company of her souls in each of the tomb stones. However, the dead was feeling lonely too. She needed someone to have a conversation with and the closer one she found, while in a walk, was her own skull…a way she could almost transcend to the live world.