sheya

Behind the scenes + process: Toys

Added 2022-12-02 05:13:40 +0000 UTC

This post documents the drawing process of ‘Toys’, a piece in my series titled “Yesterday Once More”.

Composition draft

The initial idea of this illustration was to showcase all kinds of toys coming together and marching forward (like a parade) with a young boy. It depicts a happy and enthusiastic scene. The reference picture is from the Japanese animated movie titled "Paprika".

Material Collection

I went to some old toy vendors to take photos for reference. I also collected photos of respective old toys from the Internet.

I also asked my classmate to be the model of the boy in my illustration. (Thanks a lot!)

Coloring

The photos of the toys were then cut out and placed appropriately according to the position of the draft composition. After that, fill the toys with their base colors — red, yellow, blue and green; it’ll make the picture more colorful and diverse.

Add a Multiply layer (M) above the base color. Then, give the boy and the toys a shadow.

Color adjustment

The original blue background did not match the usual color of the whole series, so I adjusted the background color to a slightly translucent yellow. For comparison, I placed it with the previous ones to see if the series is in harmony.

After comparing this image with the other images, I found that the dark colors in "Toys" were used more often and looked relatively isolated; the coloring style was not quite consistent with the rest of the color drafts.

I found two pieces by Daniel Volkov to serve as new color references. The dark shades in this image have an impressive blue-violet tone. I moved all the white shadows in "Toys" closer to the blue-violet color of the reference image, and the green-cyan objects were adjusted to a cooler purple. I also slowly removed the overwhelming colors in the picture, such as the dark green dinosaur that I adjusted to white, and the four colors of red, yellow, blue and green of the clown that I reduced to only red and blue.

Putting the color-adjusted image back into the series for comparison, the color used is now clearly more consistent with the series.

Composition Adjustment

Although the previous parade of toys was interesting, the most important thing when thinking about toys is the word "play". Adjusting the composition from the toys following the boy to the boy playing with the toys better reflects the theme of play in this layout. I moved the boy to the top left of the picture and had him face right, creating a more intimate interaction with the toys on the right.

Final rendering and refinement

Use the brush tool to lightly paint the transition between orange and light purple on the face, hands, folds and other items to soften and enrich the light and dark contours of the picture.

The composition of some of the objects was also adjusted at this stage, for example, I removed the toy car at the top and replaced it with a lighter and more visually-oriented small fish. The middle and right side of the picture had small green robots and miniature dinosaurs added, to go with the green CJ7 on the far left side of the picture.