Making of the Promotional Artwork for Enhanced
Take a look behind the scenes of the new promotional artwork for the Enhanced series from Benjamin Fernandez Media! This artwork features a concept or rough draft of what Enhanced really means.
What is Enhanced (the illustration series)?
To start, what is Enhanced? It’s a series of illustrations where I go into my backlog of older illustrations, give them a fresh coat of paint, and update the visuals on all characters that appeared over the past five years of doing digital art and illustration. No artificial intelligence is used, as I am following my own stance, which is the “Less AI, More Human Creativity” stance, and it will always have one of the badges from Not By AI.
Plus, all illustrations will be done using Procreate with the canvas size of the typical 8.5 x 11 print size, as I recently started drawing on an iPad. Currently, two illustrations have been completed in the series; more art will be made later this year.
The concept for the promotional artwork features my mascot, Amira (the girl depicted in the image and my very first character), transforming. To indicate that she is being “enhanced,” the rough draft includes areas marked in red pen, which will serve as the foundation for the visuals, composition, and colors used in the illustration.
The Illustration Process
First Phase - The Rough Sketch of Amira
On Day 1, I started drawing Amira’s headshot, which shows only her face and shoulders. As I continued to draw on Procreate and improve my experience of the Apple Pencil Pro, the sketch was almost in good shape. As I finished with the sketch, I started to focus on her eye. That is where the scribble is placed, and the area of the final, and colored variant of Amira is masked in.
Initially, I wanted to design an outline of the scribble, but it got difficult, so I decided to improvise. When doing the scribble, it took 5 or 6 redraws to find a good scribble shape. When finalizing, I have added some small blotches for a realistic effect.
Second Phase - Coloring
The next day, after doing the final line art, I began applying the base colors of Amira and the addition of her features, like shading, eye color, and her hair highlights and eyelid shadows. After finishing, I prepare finalization which is doing the composition and rendering.
Final Phase - Composition and Rendering
While finalizing, I was looking for suitable colors that would be great for the background but it was too vivid or it didn’t match with the vide. So these were the colors that weren’t used while doing the composition.
Yeeeah…it was way too much color, so I decided to go for the color of Amira which is shade of purple and lavender with a blue which one of my branding colors. Officially, it’s called “Midnight Magenta” which I considered it as the colors of the mascot.
After the background is finished, the sketch layer group is used and a bit of glitch and chroma effects were applied. For the colored layer, clipping mask is used to put inside the scribble to make it look the final piece is being revealed in front of our very eyes!