Flat landscapes are what we'll be doing today for Illustrator tasks. The concept behind the flat landscape is simple, make a flat landscape with creative use of colours to portray depth and mood. Flat landscapes are used quite often in many different forms of media, most oftenly animation. Today, we'll be doing three landscapes, a forest, a mountain range and a city. First, let's do the mountains.
First step is to get a basic idea in your head of what you'll be making. You can sketch this out or put it out on the paper straight away. The idea I have is to make some colourful mountains showing the rising sun between them. It's a cliche idea, but it works really well. With that, I start drawing some basic lines to form the mountains. I then colour them in before working on the next layer.
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Layer 1. It looks like nothing now,
but give it a few more minutes |
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| Here's layer 2 |
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| The mountains are basically done now |
Now that we've successfully established the mountains and their colour scheme, it's time to work on the sky and its sunrise effect. I was inspired by African stitch art here to use multiple different colours as layers similar to material design for the sunrise effect. I think it turned out decently well.
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| Just the basic sky |
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Added the first layer. Note that these don't
reach the bottom because they don't need to.
They'll be concealed later by other layers. |
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Next layer, we're basically building up to
to a grand sunrise |
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| Few minutes later we're adding the final touches |
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| Here' the sun to round everything off |
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| Some simple stars to round off the composition |
And that's about it. Next up, we'll do the forest. My jungle/forest idea was very simple and generic, a forest/jungle that's mysterious and unknown while still remaining magical and serene. The idea that there's no living things raises the intrigue, as you ask where everyone/thing is. Despite that, it shouldn't look to evil.
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| This will be the tree foliage |
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I've copied the tree foliage to make bushes.
It's a simple trick to waste less time,
though you shouldn't do it if it looks bad |
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| Added some tree trunks to the foreground |
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Now I've began adding some details to the mid-ground.
In front of the background, behind the foreground. |
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I've begun adding the background trees now. This actually
makes things easier for me later to cover up the clear lack
of ends on the trees with bushes accurately. |
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| As you can see here, the stumps are now gone from view |
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| With that done, we can add more details to the miground |
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The image is now technically with the background filled with colour.
I felt however that the image was way too gloomy now.
To fix this, I recoloured the whole thing.
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Now the image is brighter and more magically mysterious
and intriguing than before, at least in my opinion. |
Now that that's over with, let's take a look at the city landscape. I've made the city landscape much less traditional and colourful than it should be, with the buildings all being black and the windows and neon lighting keeping everything well lighted. The method is once again the exact same as before.
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| Final sunset mountains |
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| Darker, gloomier version of the jungle |
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| Lighter, more invitingly mysterious jungle |
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