Pomegranate Preview + Process (Patreon)

This is an early peek at another upcoming skirt collaboration with Maya Kern that I finished a while back! This is going to be a super casual post, but I thought I'd share it anyway.

(If you'd like a more in-depth look at my techniques / the process of other illustrations, you can check out my process post masterlist!)

We plan these pretty early, so even though this was in the works months ago, we had fall/winter designs on our minds - in this case, I was thinking about dark, warm colors. I've also really been enjoying drawing fruit designs, and pomegranates are in season in the fall/winter, so they seemed like a perfect match!

When I sent over my first pass, we decided it was a little too bare to be a hem design - it'd make for a pretty boring skirt. Maya brought up the idea of an all-over pattern, but I was set on making the hem work! I used her skirt mockup to rough out a revision that filled the space a bit better, plus an all-over pattern just for comparison's sake. In the end, we decided both worked, so we ran a poll on social media to see which version people preferred (in the end, hem won)

Now that I had the composition down, I drew a tighter sketch over it, double-checking the repeat every once in a while to ensure that it didn't look awkward when copy-pasted side by side. Once I was happy with that, I moved on to lineart, then colors, then rendering!

When rendering, my main goal was to make it feel rich and vivid, especially the seeds. Pomegranates always strike me as very luxurious and elegant, and I wanted that feeling to come through, so I paid extra attention to the contrast between the deep red tones and the highlights.

This one was so different from my usual work, so it was a challenge, and it turned out a bit brighter than I expected, but I'm happy with it! I'm so excited to see how the final product turns out  (I'm not sure when it will be up for sale just yet!)

PS: Sorry about the watermarks! I try to keep my signature pretty small, but for contract work I have to make it a little bigger!