This year I had the honor of being selected as a mentee for the AOI 2023 mentorship scheme. The aim of the mentorship was to set 3 goals for myself and with the guidance of my mentor bring those goals to reality.
I was paired with the lovely Jacqueline Colley as my mentor and one of my goals for this mentorship was to create a new portfolio of brand new work in order to pivot my career into new avenues, particually in Editorial Illustration.
Together we did a lot of mind-mapping and reflection of what I could develope and decided on exploring a more limited colour palette and create style of illustration that felt commercial but still me. I then set myself my own first project to be a series of posters featuring popular parks in the city of Toronto.
Why Toronto?
This year and the last I had the chance to spend my summers in Toronto and this year I fell in love with going to the parks and it became a big inspiration for me during my trip. I still wanted to create something close to my love of urban environments but to recreate them with characters of my own as well.
Creating a series of 3 posters was to help me explore a theme using consistancey in style and tone to form my new narratives. As was using a limited palette which did not limit my creativity when it came to finding the right balance of compostion, it became the element that was actually the most fun to explore.
My Process
I chose 6 parks to visit and then whittled down to the 3 that inspired me the most and began developing my photos and sketches into thumbnails, exploring different angles, compostions and colour schemes.
My mentor provided me with a great resource on how to break down an image using a limited colour palette which in turn made thumbnailing just as exciting as creating my final images. I then developed them further using watercolours.
Reflections
As much I would have loved to create the finals in watercolour, I had a hard time keeping my colours consistent with each mix, so to be more flexable I added colour to my line work using Photoshop and recreating those textures there. This was something I did before with great success from a project earlier this year called-
‘Dreaming of_’ a series of travel illustration posters created to depict a place I wished to visit also using a limited palette of 6 colours and 6 snapshots. This helped form the base for this project and I was able to create my images quickly and confidently from this exploration. It was quite surprising how quickly this small personal project has already begun to influence my creative voice and I was thankful that I had done it.
samples of Dreaming_Of
I happy with the end results as you can tell from my excitement to share my journey and I look forward to sharing more thoughts and see how my work continues to grew as I continue my mentorship.
