Nature Illustration

From all of the drawings that I had done before this with an outdoors nature theme trending the area of my experimentation was going to related to nature, how can I represent nature through illustration and how can I enhance illustration through things we find in nature.

To start off I did a concept illustration of nature, the style inspired by Japanese tattoo artwork for its bright colours with my own twist to it. To me nature is wild, random and bursting with colour. If you visit a florist or a nature garden your senses are overloaded with colour and smells. My picture dosn't make much sense because water is unlikely to come bursting form a tree trunk with a giant coy carp riding a huge wave but what I was trying to get at was how nature is interconnected just as this drawing is. Nature is made up of hundreds of eco systems each animal, plant and insect playing its part like cogs in a pocket watch to keep it ticking. 

While drawing the concept of nature illustration I noticed something, Repetition. Flowers have many petals, fish many scales, and birds many feathers. Contrary to common belief of nature being random, it has a habit of repeating its self. I took this as an opportunity to to further explore illustration, first by  drawing the carp again and giving it a black outline only.

I added colour, only to the scales as this is my point of focus using one colour as this emphasises the repetition. 

Here I brushed a piece of paper in black and red ink to give an interesting pattern, I cut the paper into scale shapes and stuck each scale on overlapping them. This gives a scale textured effect so now the illustration is more than just something to look at, you can touch it as well.

Using some brown paper form a gift shop which was decorated with cherubs and music notation I did the same thing again, this has less of a texture and the edges of the scales are less defined. 

For my Final experiment I gathered leaves from outside the front of my house. Using pva glue I stuck them down. This doesn't have nearly the same amount of repetition to it except for the colour of the leaves. what is interesting the the overlapping of the smaller pieces leaf and the edges formed that are almost scale like.