affinity designer Aboriginal Business Magazine - a recent isometric cover illo

[retrograde]

Hi all Affinity-leaning creative types, here's a recent cover piece completed for a Canadian magazine entitled Aboriginal Business Quarterly based in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. The theme of this Spring 2018 issue is Transportation and Infrastructure in Northern Canada.

The snow and ice are finally melting, making way for a busy season of road work/maintenance and resupply shipping - by boat and float planes equipped with skis - supporting various remote communities and industries. 

It's another example of my Affinity Designer isometric styled compositions built up using a limited colour palette, simplified elements and extensive use of gradients... And of course the awesome isometric grid feature.

For those interested, there are more views of this piece on my Behance site.  Hope you like. :-)

https://www.behance.net/gallery/65266715/Aboriginal-Business-Quarterly-Cover-Affinity-Designer

 

[MEB]

Fantastic work Kevin as usual. The limited colour palette plus smooth shading works really well.
Thanks for sharing.

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, MEB said:

Fantastic work Kevin as usual. The limited colour palette plus smooth shading works really well.
Thanks for sharing.

He makes it look so easy, doesn’t he! Wonderful stuff.

[StuartRc]

Fantastic and 'polished' graphic style..brilliant as usual.

Also really like the Madame Butterfly illustration on Behance..

[retrograde]

Cheers all! This was the first illustrative cover I believe the publication has ever had, so I wanted it to be distinctively non photographic in look and feel. Designer is a big part of the success of this one. The more I use it the more I appreciate how smooth the workflow can be.

That Madame Butterfly piece was a long time coming. An idea I had 'floating' around for awhile, I'm glad you liked it Stuart!

[Ros]

I love every single bit of it.

[retrograde]

3 minutes ago, Ros said:

I love every single bit of it.

Thanks Ros!

You might want check out some of the closer views on my Behance page.

[GarryP]

This is a really lovely illustration that I wish I had the talent to make myself but, unfortunately, I don't.

While looking between the wire-frame and finished piece - to try and figure out how some of it was made - I noticed some "oddities".

1. The trees at the bottom-left seem to have some kind of outline around them that doesn't make any difference that I can see.
2. The propellers on the plane have an angular shape in the wire-frame rather than the curved shape they have on the finished image.

Can anyone explain these things? (I don't use the wire-frame mode very often so I don't know if this is expected behaviour.)

[retrograde]

6 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Can anyone explain these things? (I don't use the wire-frame mode very often so I don't know if this is expected behaviour.)

Thanks GarryP. Those angular "odd" shapes are shapes that I use to mask out areas I don't want seen. The trees are supposed to be behind the hillside so I use a shape to cut off the bottoms, same for the propellers. It's easier and quicker to drop an element into a mask shape to hide a portion of it. I did a similar trick for the wheels on the plane.  :-)

[GarryP]

Ah, masking, of course. It makes sense now.
The software I was using before Designer didn't have this feature so my brain still isn't used to thinking of doing things that way round.

Thanks. Always good to learn from an expert.

[retrograde]

Expert? Not sure about that. I just try to use any trick I can to achieve a result.

[Alfred]

1 minute ago, retrograde said:

Expert? Not sure about that. I just try to use any trick I can to achieve a result.

But ... that’s exactly what experts do!