Here’s another positivity poster piece that I recently finished. I’ve been working on my illustration style skills using brush packs from Retro Supply Co. I practically have all their packs made for Adobe Illustrator. This one kicked my iMac’s memory to the curb so I bought another 16g of memory top max out my machines 32g capabilities.
But first, I wanted to chat about the “why” behind this design. Far too often it is all to easy to rush into a decision. If you are an enneagram 6 like myself, then you know the massive amounts of indecision we walk around with daily. For me, this inspo piece visually represents some foundational concepts rooted in this spirit animal. ]
First, by nature owl’s tend to be solo creatures of the night. For a 6, solo and night time can be a scarry place or some but I tend to find it exciting. Owl’s have also been a symbol for wisdom and the older I get, the more I prefer the quiet spaces to explore as well as to sit in and listen.
I found this quote a few weeks back and this was one of the inspirations behind creating this piece.
“How we respond to the light depends on how we relate to our own darkness.””
To live in both worlds once needs to find their own place of security and confidence. Wisdom is one path to get there. I find when I have my trusted circle of wise friends, the stronger I become in the process.
Now onto to the process and limitations I discovered in creating this piece.
In the process I learned that it was better to isolate the owl and all its brush elements and create an .EPS files that I could easily open in Photoshop, tweak the colors and then place it back into Illustrator to keep my files sizes down.
The initial non-expanded owl with brushes was like 500m. When I expanded them, the file size was over 1g.
The document working size is 11×17 so it was easier for brush control.
Here’s some more images and close ups from this piece.
Hope you enjoy! If you are looking for poster design, product packaging or branding, drop me a line. I’d love to chat with you.
