Canadian Running Half-Page Illustration

Here's a half-page illustration I did for Canadian Running, it'll be published in their September/October issue. It's for a regular column they run that's written by a runner named Peter Hadzipetros who shares his insights, funny stories, and lessons learned about marathon running.

In this piece I wanted to challenge myself a bit, so when I silkscreened the colours I did two gradients. The yellow and the blue both do a gradual fade into white. In this piece it helps to indicate the haziness of a hot day and the distance reaching back into the background. Gradients are tricky to do with silkscreen printing, but I think I might start using it more in the future.


Here was my initial sketch. The client wanted it to be simpler and to incorporate a face, so this was my next one:


Here's the second sketch, which I like a lot. The simplification really helped. And because it's more of an entertaining opinion piece, it's nice to have a personal focus with the figure. The client wanted the full figure shown, which leads us to the final product. I always seem to lean towards cropping images in close, so it's good that I have a full figure in my portfolio now!

I don't often use orange, I don't know why. Whenever I try to, it creeps into the red or pink territory. My "Add Rhyme and Mix" piece also has some orange in it, lately I've been making an effort. So not only am I glad I got to work on doing hand-done colour gradients, but I broadened my colour palette, too! My next goal is to do an illustration with a cool purple or blue in it.

It's always great to get a new client, I was thrilled to get a chance to work with the magazine! Hope you enjoyed seeing my process.

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