30 Days of Illustration -2/30: florals in gouache

For Day 2 of my 30 Days of Illustration challenge, I thought I would make an image based on a beautiful shirt I own. The shirt is covered in flowers on a white background. It reminds me of Primavera by Botticelli.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3c/Botticelli-primavera.jpg/1024px-Botticelli-primavera.jpg

I like the wistful quality of the material, and the way that the pattern covers the fabric. I like the paleness of the fabric and it’s slightly see-through quality. The shirt is an old Uniqlo one which I wear often.

I am often drawn to using watercolour or coloured pencil, but I thought that for this illustration I would try to use my Acryla Gouache. They have a really nice, opaque quality.

I also bought some water-fast black ink for line art. I thought I might give that a go too. I want to edit my illustrations on the computer in different layers, so I will paint the gouache layer and the ink lines on separate sheets of paper using a lightbox. The setup looks like this.

And here’s how the final version ended up! I’m really happy with the choppy editing style. If I had more time, I’d like to try adding some more texture to the drawing, but as it is, this will have to do! Say hello to my modern Primavera.