Illustration Friday: Olympics

This one was from a few weeks ago but I did a large project with it. I picked one of the Canadian athletes going to the winter games in Pyeong Chang 2018 and made a poster for them to advertise the games. I picked the athlete Larkyn Austman and she is a figure skater.

To create a good poster composition, I looked at the work of Bob Peak and David Grove. These are some of the references I used to help me with my design.

Then I drew some thumbnails of my athlete with an action shot of them. I tried to use the techniques used in my reference pictures.

I picked the bottom left and continued with the design in Photoshop. I used these pictures of her for the poster design.

Here's a picture of my design after I finished her head. I used the three blobs of paint on the right side of her head as her skin tone. From top, it's the shadow, next is the midtone, and last is the highlights. I had to blend the colours together by changing the opacity of the paint. I usually kept the opacity at 40-50%.

Finally, here is my final poster. I made the background different shades to make it interesting and I wanted the colour to be a light blue by the bottom so she looks like she's skating on ice. I added the maple leaf behind her head to show she's canadian and also to make some contrast.

This was a lot of work but I'm happy with the final result.