Layering techniques

Your illustrations should never be limited because of a lack of assets. Everything is left to your own interpretation and you should never be afraid to experiment. So avoid illustrator’s block by creating a range of assets that’ll do a great job of making your work totally unique.

For this image, I simply walked out of my front door and took a few photographs of my surroundings – a photo of a palm tree trunk, a piece of a cardboard box and other random textures around the house. And that was all I needed to get started.

I have a fascination with trees. They are such great structures and I always feel the need to use them in almost everything I do. They can take on any shape or colour and are a great asset to help form any composition. Throughout this tutorial, you’ll be shown how to make organic pieces out of structured assets such as this.

Using loads of Copy, Paste, Scale and Rotation you’ll see that one very simple element can be used to build almost an entire piece. With good use of colour, shading, and a few basic textures, you’ll soon find you have the ability to build almost any scene you can imagine.

In addition to the simple textured elements you will create in Photoshop, you’ll also construct a few 3D elements, using simple texture mapping techniques to build 3D shapes that will give your final image extra depth. I use Cinema 4D for all of my 3D work, but most 3D packages will be up to the task.

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