I created these Birth Poster Illustrations for a competition. The brief was about drawing birth poster illustrations with one single, continuous line or a cascade of multiple lines (I went for the latter technique) using one solid colour. The final art work had to be scalable to any size without quality loss for customers to be able to choose the exact 1:1 size of their new born babies.
For line art illustrations I always use my isograph pens (0.4 mm tip on this particular occasion) because they have a really dense ink, that helps me draw super black and non-dripping lines that dry quickly so they won’t smear. Each illustration took up around 1/3 of an A/4 paper so I could just scan them at one go at the end which was very quick and easy.
Little did I know, the majority of the work was still ahead of me. I carried out a little bit of editing in PhotoShop when I increased the contrast between the black lines and white background so then it would be easier to separate them, delete the white parts and save the image as a PNG. But then I had to vectorise it, and it did not matter how much I finetuned the settings, the process resulted really wobbly and uneven lines. First, I tried to move the anchor points around but it was so incredibly slow and tedious that I decided to pretty much redraw the images using the pencil tool which was must faster, but still incredibly slow. The 4 drawings took me around 2,5 working days to create but I was quite happy with the results so I guess it was all worth it at the end.
art from scratch 