{"id":1084,"date":"2016-06-01T14:30:22","date_gmt":"2016-06-01T14:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/telmed\/?p=1084"},"modified":"2020-01-06T15:45:02","modified_gmt":"2020-01-06T15:45:02","slug":"illustrating-tonkolilli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/illustrating-tonkolilli\/","title":{"rendered":"Illustrating Tonkolilli"},"content":{"rendered":"

— This post was written by Elizabeth Seymour —<\/em><\/p>\n

As the illustrator for the iCARE project, I have had the task of recreating a rural village from Tonkolilli in Sierra Leone in a recognisable, and yet comic-book fashion – quite a challenge!<\/p>\n

Our contacts in Masanga Hopsital were able to give me a little information regarding descriptions of the local villages but didn’t have any photographs they could send me, so I had to use Google Image searches and images from traveller’s blogs for a visual reference, comparing each image with the descriptions our colleagues provided, and compiled a mood board of images I liked.<\/p>\n

\"moodboard\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From this, I put together a colour palette to use in all of my illustrations:<\/p>\n

\"palette\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From my moodboard, I then identified a collection of assets I would need to draw; trees, houses, washing lines and a few chickens. For the village I drew my images out on paper first (although to save time later in the project I skipped this step and went straight to drawing in Adobe Illustrator).<\/p>\n

\"village<\/a><\/p>\n

I scanned these images into Photoshop, were I played about with the composition of them until I had a village layout that I was happy resembled the feeling of my mood board.<\/p>\n

\"villagecomp\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Then I moved my scans into Adobe Illustrator, where I traced each one individually (so I could reuse any assets in later scenes as required). The process I followed to produce these illustrations was slightly different to my usual Illustrator workflow, mainly in an effort to speed up the image production for such a tight deadline, but also because I usually work in a more typical “clean” vector style, and this project called for a comic-book style.<\/p>\n

The steps were as follows:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Trace or draw the outlines of the asset.\n