Hello! I just wanted to introduce myself in case you hadn't met me before. I'm Adriana Hernandez-Bergstrom! I go by Adriprints on my work, and you can find me really easily with that moniker. I'm the founder of the Finch & Foxglove art collective, and I did the first illustration on our digital Advent Calendar.
I am a really process-oriented person and I love learning how others get to the images they do. I hope you can learn a little bit from my process too!
The "Noel Peppermint Bark" illustration started off as a doodle that I did in August or September. I was at my mom's house playing around with an old watercolor set that I had left at her house in case all my luggage was lost. In my mind, I was working on a tropical-Christmas kind of theme...
In between then and now, our group came up with a wonderful color palette for our advent calendar. We looked at vintage Christmas postcards to get us started. These colors were rich and wonderful, but not really tropical... and I really wanted to use the "Noel" lettering. So I traced the lettering in Adobe Illustrator with the pen tool, used a color from our palette, and started working on composition with the other illustration assets that matched the palette a bit better. I had created these assets or icons a few weeks ago by painting in watered down gouache. They were extras from the greeting card project I did in October, and I did a direct "live trace" using Adobe Illustrator to capture them...
Once I had a composition that I liked, I brought each element separately into Photoshop, converted them to Vector Smart Objects and began to add texture and depth...
I really wanted a rich feeling like chocolate in the background, and at first I tried mint + chocolate with the lettering...
But, as you can see it looked a bit too cold in this version. It read like mold or marble or something unappetizing. So, next I tried peppermint, and that is what you see in the final image. A little bit tastier, I think!
