This one’s a rather personal piece about the relief and awakening that can happen while working through mental health challenges. With guidance and comprehensive care—whether it’s medication, talk therapy, diet and exercise—hope and healing can bloom.
Process
Every good idea starts with a little scribble. The idea for this illustration began as an Inktober prompt in 2018, which I revisited a few years later.
Normally, I begin every illustration with thumbnail sketches to understand how the elements are supposed to fit within the image frame. I work in greyscale to figure out how lighting will affect the composition, and then apply color. Even though the idea was already fleshed out, I still wanted to return to the thumbnails to see if a better composition could surface.
Above: the original image in ink, plus some thumbnails worked digitally.
