Behind the scenes + process: Yesterday Once More - Ballon (Patreon)

This post documents the process of “Balloon”—a piece from my final project titled "Yesterday Once More", which is a series of illustrations depicting memories from my childhood.

Draft of composition

The theme for this particular piece is inspired by the alluring balloons that I saw frequently throughout my childhood, so the composition is kept simple and straightforward; most of the layout is filled with balloons, and the person holding the balloon strings together is standing at the bottom of the picture.

Photo Materials

I wanted to show the most common balloons in the hands of street vendors. To replicate reality, I took many street photos during the research phase in early January, which prepared a lot of references for the balloons for me. I finally chose a picture with the fullest and clearest balloon shapes as the first reference for this illustration.

Remove the people and balloons from the photo and place them on the horizontal canvas. The image is simpler on top, and the balloons occupy the most crucial area of the picture.

Color Reference

As a series of illustrations, the primary color scheme needs to have both a variation and similarities. I wanted to use the same highly saturated background on the balloons as on the kites, and the subject matter to be bright and varied enough to create a strong contrast with the background.

After some searching, I was amazed by one of Daniel Volkov's oil paintings: the image is extremely rich in warm, cool, and gray variations. The highly saturated blue-purple sky is similar to the cyan sky of the kite, and the pink flowers can also be used as a color reference for my pink balloons.

I tried to apply the colors from this oil painting in the balloon. The process of coloring is almost the same as Different Seasons, still using the auto-selection tool to select the corresponding area and then fill in the color. A detailed explanation of the text can be found in my previous "DIfferent Seasons" process tutorial. In this painting, I gave priority to the pink and white balloons, which took up thelmost prominent area, and then added the remaining secondary colors according to the color blocking of the picture.

Subjective adjustment of color block distribution

If the color scheme is based entirely on the original photo, the left area of the image is almost pink or red balloons, and after separating them into color blocks, several balloons looked as if they were stuck together.

In order to prevent the balloons from seeming like they've merged, I changed the base colors of the balloons. The original red and pink balloons were changed to white, so that the same color balloon position staggered.

In the coloring process, first determine the area of the large, white and red balloon distribution, then fill a relatively small area, with blue and green decorative balloons.

Enhancing the transparency of the balloons

In painting the balloons, I did not let the brush color at 100% concentration but let the balloons maintain an 80% to 90% opacity. The advantage of this is that once the background color is added to the picture, the balloon can naturally take on a little bit of the background color to better blend with the environment. The image below shows the background's effect directly after filling with blue.

To reflect the abundance of balloons in my aunt's hands, the balloons were illustrated in a way where they looked like they were tightly squeezed against each other. Instead of keeping the base background of the balloons the same color as the sky, I chose a darker pink color to hint that the darker balloons are not obvious enough.

By placing the base colors of the existing balloons on top of the dark pink base color, the depth of the balloons have increased.

Adjust character’s color & add blue background

I studied the colors of the ground in Daniel Volkov's paintings and applied them to the figure's  costume.

Add black hair to the face and adjust the figure from a front face view to a side view. Finally, fill in the highly saturated blue background.

Adding a little girl

Although a single character works well, adding a child looking up at the balloon behind the adult can suggest that "the child wants the balloon" and make the image more lively and vivid.

Thanks to the abundance of street-side footage I took during the research phase, I took the little girl from another photo, flipped it over and placed it to the adult's left.

Adding peripheral balloons

The number of balloons is relatively small compared to the initial draft. The silhouettes of the balloons also do not form the ideal semicircle as depicted in the draft.

I roughly drew some white and pink color blocks around the balloon with a brush to visualize the effect of the balloon when it is enriched. A new balloon layer (3-4 ) was then added below the existing layer (3-5).

For the consideration of the near real and far virtual picture, the balloon in the center of the picture has the highest purity and the richest color contrast, and the newly added balloons on both sides are mostly white or gray-pink, producing a pure gray contrast with the balloons in the center. At the same time, the overall shadows on both sides are blue, echoing the ambient color of the sky, and finally presenting a good effect of merging reality and fiction together.

Using Glaze to create oil painting texture

Importing the existing images into Glaze, a filter software for iPad, to get images with oil painting strokes. (For a detailed text explanation of the application of the oil painting filter Glaze, please click the process tutorial of Early Spring & Summer)

The eraser tool was then used to erase the central area to ensure that the shaping of the key areas of the picture remained visible, leaving only the edges of the picture with a hazy, oil-painted texture.

A round of refinement

After the composition and color relationships were already very well developed, refinement was like the icing on the cake. I used the brush 画笔 in procreate to add white highlights and a soft transition between light and dark to the balloon.

Second round of refinement

Add a richer cartoony pattern to the balloon after a round of refinement, and increase the overall saturation.

Finally, refine the hair of the characters and the eyelashes of the girl; so that the picture is not too gray.

The work is now successfully completed!

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This is the illustration with the smoothest journey in the whole series. Compared to other works, some are just too difficult to produce. A handful of materials were sufficient, and the reference pictures were just right. But even though the original photo has a whole premise, I still needed to make many improvements, such as adjusting the balloon's primary colors, adding the little girl, enriching the surrounding balloons, etc.

Still sending thanks to my friend Valerie for helping me with the English translations. You're welcome to comment if you have anything to talk about!

See you next time!