I recently went on a graduation trip to Hawaii with my family and I went diving with the sea creatures! It was terrifying at first but it ended up being a fun experience! Inspired by my trip, I wanted to capture the magic of the world under the sea. I was looking at a lot of motion designers' work, and was inspired to create this piece in a more graphic style, paying more attention to the shapes that I was creating, and purposefully making the composition more dynamic. I also tried my best to record my progress along the way, and here is a breakdown of my thought process.
I started with the composition on the left. While I was happy with the overall placement of my characters, the pose just seemed a bit static for me, and I wanted to make it more dynamic, so I started to play with the proportions of my character's limbs.
After I was 90% happy with my composition, I started to roughly block in the colors. It usually takes a bit of trial and error to achive a color palette that I'm happy with. When I was somewhat happy with my color choices, I started to think about lighting, and especially how to use lighting to direct the attention to my characters. I also wanted to keep the graphic style of this piece, and I wanted to keep the lighing as organic shapes.
While the lighting looks good as clear shapes, I wanted some of the edges to be softer, so I started playing with gaussian blurs and gradients. During the process I also adjusted the color of some of the fishes and added additional details to them. As one of the final touches, even though it makes no sense for there to be random lines underwater, I thought they added a nice sense of motion and tied the whole composition together better.
As a final touch, I also added some texture to the parts that felt flat, and made some final color changes. I might work more into this later but for now here is where I ended up.
