You know, the kid in a candy store feeling, but multiplied by 1000? (and I’m probably missing some more zeroes in there ;P ). A love letter to all the awesome art stores I’ve ever visited! <3 Okay, I know this is not quite a dream (bed)room, but hey, art supply stores are pretty dreamy, no? ;P Thank you Weronika for such a cool class!

I had a specific goal in mind when making this illustration: I was going to attend a risography workshop, to make A3-sized prints in 3 colour inks, so I decided to design a picture for this specific printing process rather than split colour channels on something I’d drawn before. I wanted to explore the colour-mixing combinations using something very colourful, and then I thought that an art-supply shop was the ideal background for that ^_^

I drew this on iPad in Procreate (using quite a lot of tips learned from Cris Tamay's short and sweet Digital illustration for risography class)
, but since I was working on an A3 HD file, the battery kept draining faster than it could charge, so that even when plugged in, the whole thing would eventually shut down on me... Good thing the autosave is so good ^_^; The result was that every couple of hours I would be forced to stop and wait for it to charge for an hour (around 25%) before I could keep going... So I only finished drawing during the time we were allotted to prep our files for printing, oops! But I did finish! Yay!

The final illustration (also on Instagram @echo.ism and @echo.printmaker):

 

The riso print in fluorescent pink, yellow and medium blue (available in my webshop!)

 

Details on the print (look at this grainy texture! <3):

Now for some process pics!

I found the tip on sketching different elements (or even subparts of the same element) in different colours really helpful :

Adding more furniture, and the artist!

I was short on time, so I knew I was not going to make a lot of changes to the outlines. Once I decided to keep an element as is, I switched the outline colour to the intended blue. I kept adding in new element in different colours though. For elements that I wanted to repeat (such as the small ink box in the top left corner below), I drew them in a corner on a separate layer, then duplicated them to place them in the image.

My palette was constrained by what I could obtain by mixing 3 riso inks. I made some test swatches before hand to quickly visualize the range I'd be working with. I was hesitating at first betwen fluo pink+yellow+medium blue (left) or fluo orange+yellow+medium blue (right), but decided to pick the first one in the end because I liked the purples better. Of course, you can get many more colours from these inks, by varying opacity and adding triadic colours, but I just needed a quick guide.

Starting to add colours: all colours were mixed using three layers in Procreate, one for each ink colour. On each layer, I only drew in grayscale: the darker the value the darker the ink. The wall colour for instance is made of a medium grey area on the pink layer, the same area in light grey on the yellow layer, and in white on the blue layer. More details on my project for the risography class if you are curious :)

This is what the grayscale layer for blue ink looked like, plus the blue outlines, that I eventually turned to black before merging down to the rest of the image. The darker the grey, the more blue ink would be outputted on the print.

Test printing of just the pink and yellow layers:

Test printing of the blue layer:

Thank you for reading! ^_^ If you like my work, you can find me on Instagram @echo.ism and @echo.printmaker.