Illustration

May 31, 2023

Urban Illustration

Russell and I travel a lot. Russell likes to take pictures. I like to illustrate. What better way to document our travels than to illustrate Russell's photos? Germany, USA, Norway, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Portugal are just a few of the countries on our list that we have already visited together.

In this Tutorial I'll show you my best tricks and smartest workflows to turn urban photography into geometric and minimalistic illustrations with lots of atmosphere and depth. In the video on Digiversity.tv Russell and I will guide you through our new book project "Right here, Right now" in which we bundle our photos, illustrations and stories about our travels and adventures.

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London

Color Transition in the Shadows

In this image I took a lot of creative freedom to change the colors and the entire mood of the scene.

What originally spoke to me was the heavy contrast of the red door, the light stone of the building and the tree in the shadow as well as the shadow of the tree.

As I was working on it, I tried different color variations with the recolor artwork feature.

The dreamy mood of the pastel colors really spoke to me and it was the perfect scene to play with something that I learned in one of Marco Buccis Tutorials: Color Transition in the shadows.

‍The challenge that intrigued me was how to create this effect in a vector program and make it look like a painting!

Photo by Russell Viers

Compressed Color Fall Off

Color Transition in the Shadows

The color transition between light and shadow areas is a wonderful effect that can add some realism and beauty to your illustrations and paintings.

The Effect occurs because the color of the light is changing as it loses energy into the shadows. It is basically a Light Fall Off in a very compressed space.

If you want to learn more about this effect, how it works and how to apply it to your art, watch this great video by Marco Bucco.

Watch "Master This Color Transition In Your Paintings" by Marco Bucci

Blending Modes

How to achieve this in Adobe illustrator

The question now is how to achieve this effect in a vector program like Adobe Illustrator. I am sharing here how I achieved this effect.

Since this effect depends on the blending modes and the colors you are using in your art, you might have to vary and play with the blending modes until you get the result you like.

Here comes the Setup!

1.

Stroke and Fill

The big shadow shape of the tree has a purple fill color that is set to "Multiply" and a peach stroke color of 4 point, that is set to the Blending Mode "Screen".

2.

Gaussian Blur

In this step I added a Gaussian Blur Effect to the big tree shadow and you can see that the transition between light and shadow is starting to become more colorful.

I added a Gaussian Blur to the stroke and a separate Blur to the fill to control the different strengths.

3.

Make it sing!

On top of my composition I added a layer with a free form gradient and set it to Overlay.

This effect really brings out the color transition in the shadows.

4.

Grainy Texture

As a last step I added a layer with some Grain to the image to add texture and grit. This is a simple rectangle with a 50% gray Fill, with a Grain Effect applied and set to Overlay.

United States of America

Tyrone, Colorado

Width Tool & Transform Effect

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Photo by Russell Viers

Copyright + No AI

Urban Illustration

London

Color Transition in the Shadows

How to achieve this in Adobe illustrator

1.

Stroke and Fill

2.

Gaussian Blur

3.

Make it sing!

4.

Grainy Texture

Tyrone, Colorado

OSLO

OSLO