Story in a Bottle

Yay!!! I've finished my final piece for this month's MATS Bootcamp Assignment: Nautical theme! I'm really excited about it. This month was sooo much fun. For some reason the nautical theme just hit me. Made tons of sketches and ended up using some icons out of them in my final design. We had to make a piece for the Wall Art market, which is a flourishing business, as Lilla tells us. For me this felt like a perfect assignment, as I had a lot of freedom to make what I like. The image did have to meet some exact measurements, but for the rest you were pretty much free what to make. So lots of time to play around. And that just happens to be one of my favorite ways of spending time ;-)

Down here I'll show you some pictures of the steps I took and the sketches I made, that led to my final piece.

I started playing around with my favorite Tombow markers at first. They always give me a good start and a nice playful feeling. Decided to try out watersoluble crayons as well (Neocolor 2, Caran d'Ache). Started with drawing some basic shapes, then added lots of water and finished with black pens and white gel pens. Don't these whales just have the most beautiful blue colours? I really like them, especially the one on the bottom!

An idea popped up, worked it out with pencil and black pen. Decided to keep sketching, I didn't feel like this was to be my definite piece.

Then I made some small sketches in black and white. Used a scribbling way of filling them up with a black pen. Gave them kind of a textured look. I thought it might fit with a final piece with a little bit of a distressed, old look.

I felt really happy with the icons, but just didn't know how to use them. Decided to give it a rest. A few days later an idea popped up. I would put the icons on a scroll in a bottle. The scroll would have to tell a small story. So I just started sketching. Trying to get a picture that's in your head on the paper, is the most fun piece of the process for me. Like writing a story with pictures. I love it!

 And here's my final piece! I used Photoshop to put it all together including the text. Used a page out of a very old map collection as background. Scanned in some cardboard as well and put that as a texture over it to get kind of an old, faded look. Added some more texture (ink splatters) and text to it, and voila, I felt like my final piece was done! Do you like it?