#ItsAdvent 2016 Day Two

A folk angel by Amber Lynn Benton  for #ItsAdvent 2016.

I had a lot of fun drawing this angel. This was the illustration when I really began to figure out how to put these pieces together into a collection. That included what style to draw them in and how to set up my brushes and palette.

I have a document set up in illustrator with my colors saved in the swatches panel and my brush palette loaded with my customized brushes. I also have my mood board locked in a layer on the art board.

Before I work on a new piece I import my sketch and lock it into place. Then I build the line work using pressure sensitive brushes that I set up. I've learned to be careful and think things through - what layers need to be in back and which in front? After all of the line work is done I go back through the layers expanding and unifying most of the line work so that I can drop in colors using the shape builder tool. (This is much easier than redrawing all of the shapes like I did on the first two illustrations.

What I'm learning is that no matter how much experience you have, every time you experiment and do something in a new way you are going to be inefficient. It's going to take a while for you to even figure out what you are trying to do. Then you can practice coming up with a better way to do it.