Making of The Girl Walking on Clouds
1/30/2025
Preview of Final Results
Introduction
This is a personal project overview of my illustration "Little girl walking on clouds". I will not go into detail, assuming the reader has some basic knowledge of Photoshop brushes and some drawing skills. The concept is about a little cute cartoon girl who is on a long journey above the clouds. During her long walk, she had to pull a heavy wooden cart full of pencils, and she knows that "there is no victory without suffering".
Before I start, I would like to say that I illustrated this character in 2010 and have always wanted to animate all my digital paintings and see them come to life. And this year I had the opportunity to to see animation of this digital painting: And I was very happy with the result.
Here is the youtube link for you, I hope you like it too :)
STEP 1 - Character and Background Sketch
I always start my conceptual work with a sketch. So I started by thinking about the figure of the "girl" and sketched several different views.
STEP 2 - Adding the Background and Items
After the sketch was done, I started to try out some colours for the background. Here I separated 4 layers, one is for the character, another is for the car and the pencils, the other is for the background colour and the other one is for the clouds. Because if I am not satisfied with the colour and want to change, I can make some changes with the help of these layers.
STEP 3 - Colouring
For the character, I started by filling in the general lines and giving them dimensions. Because of the direction of the light, the shadows are fixed. The light comes from a cloudy sky and a little daylight, so there wouldn't be a clear shining light, but some vivid colours.
STEP 5 - Adding Details
I painted the wooden cart and the penciles and add more details to her hair and cloth.
STEP 4 - The Background
I started painting the background. In this step I knew I wanted my background to look cloudy, with some white and grey big clouds. I try lots of blues and reds and greens. This is where I work out the general look I'm going for.
