Ella 7

I used Adobe illustrator to put the separate elements together into a composition. I used a tall thin frame to exaggerate Alice looking up at the birds. I wanted to make a frame inside the page boundaries and have some negative space around the edges to contrast with the busy and bold composition. I needed to find a way to create a border that fits with the rest of the piece.

 I didn't want the border to be a perfect sharp edged line as all of the pieces I used to build up the image although vectored are hand drawn and aren't 'perfect'. I think a straight edged border would clash with the rest of the image so i made a broken up line and built up the frame from there. I wanted some of the lettering to overlap and leave the frame to break up the structure of it and make the overall shape more interesting and appealing as if some of the elements are leaving the confines of the image. i tried to use brown as the colour for the border as I have tried to avoid black (even though the character line work is a dark grey).

I like using textures but have been trying in recent work to add textures to make the images feel more crafted and 'real'. I watched a few tutorials to find some new ways to achieve this and started to look at overlaying textures using multiply on Illustrator. Doing this muted the colours I had used and made solid vector shapes look as though they had been painted or printed. I really liked the muted colours and the image looked bright enough on screen but when i printed it the image was too dark. The character I drew for Alice was the darkest  section of the image and got lost among the lettering and grass at the bottom of the page. I tried changing tones and exporting the image to Photoshop to change the brightness of the entire image as one. it was a difficult process as I had to keep printing off copies to give me a good idea what the final piece would look like. I have a laptop with a good quality screen but it might be time to invest in a more colour accurate monitor!!