Sleep Illustration

I was recently asked to work on an illustration for a Teen Times story focused on teens not getting enough sleep for a variety of reasons. I used a student from Southwood High School who came into the studio for a photo that I would be able to use in the illustration, senior Ashley Mancil.

I started out by making a solid black image in photoshop. I then used various levels of opacity on the brush tool (in dissolve mode) to drag across the black to attempt to create a sky full of stars. After using this method I also used the brush tool at various sizes to spot the sky with larger "stars" and planets and tried to make some of the stars glare.

Next I added a new layer of Ashley that I took in our studio and inversed the photo.

I then added a two different layers of clouds that I shot on my way home from an assignment several years ago to give the sky some depth. The opacity of these two layers ended up being quite low so the clouds would be translucent.

The next step was to add the moon, a new layer taken from a shot I made two years ago at Summer Grove Baptist church in Shreveport.

The final step was to flatten the images and make put a little radial blur on the edges.

It probably took about 2 hours total work from start to finish (between other daily assignments over two days. After working on an illustration for a while I find it good to walk away from the project for a little while every so often, otherwise I find myself sitting and working on my illustrations for hours...............at some point you just have to say "I'm done and move on to the next one."

"I'm done."