German Wings Illustrations

I've recently received a copy of GW Magazine through the post in which I've done a series of illustrations. I was commissioned to illustrate three walks through different geographical regions of Germany, a page showing what to pack when hiking, and a landscape typical of rural Germany. I thought that i'd share the process of creating the finished landscape illustration.

The image that I chose to use was from an old 1970's reference book of Germany that I bought from Deptford market a few years ago. I've drawn from the same image in the past in one of my sketchbooks and at Pick Me Up and felt that it would work nicely in colour for this job. Below is the old sketch that I did. I would have loved to use my own reference but unfortunately i've not got a great deal of countryside snaps.

I then worked this up for the rough. As this image was to be almost full page with the title of the article in the bottom third of the page I wanted to create a visual break at the bottom of the illustration. I tried adding some silhouettes of plants, these were refined quite a lot in the final illustration.

Working this up for the final illustration was quite a challenge as i've never really coloured an entire scene in coloured pencil before. Adding the flag pole and changing the house to an old timber frame helped to give the image more context within the article. I started off by planning the composition in light pencil and marking out the various colours and textures of the fields and forest so that it became almost a paint-by-numbers process to complete.

After doing this I gradually filled in and added more layers of colour to build up the various textures. Finally I went over the whole drawing with pencil adding in the shadows and sharpening some of the line-work. Overall this took me almost three days and the physical artwork is about A4 in size. The art director was quite keen for the illustration to be quite detailed and accurate and i'm really pleased with how it worked out. Below is the finished illustration and the page in print. As you can see the grass in the foreground is more restrained and helps tie together the illustration and the titles.