Makeup Illustration for Purpletale

News on the makeup illustration front before the month is over!

Because I went to Seoul over the weekend, this month's end is coming on way too suddenly! I'd planned to get at least one more makeup review up, but yeah, here's a quick work update instead. 

While what I call my monthly salary as a freelance illustrator comes 90% from things like textbook illustrations, coloring books, layouting and other large serial orders from companies, there's also these fun little projects in-between that I love so much! 

This is another example - an illustration for new skincare brand 'Purpletale'!

Check out their international website here, or their Korean one here. 

The illustration depicts their current product range - 8 products in total, mostly in the skincare department, but there's a BB cream and primer, too.

We went for a 'flatlay' look, and as the brand's names are all (really adorably!) inspired by stories, books and fairytales, I added details like book pages and book illustrations in the background. 

                   

Which gave us the possibility of featuring the main ingredients in the form of a textbook-like illustration beneath the products. Nifty, right?

Patterns on book covers! I had so much fun with these, especially since this time, I didn't use any sort of outlines except faint pencil guides. It makes for a softer, polished look.

Adding color on a large format (and for watercolor and me, anything beyond a postcard is a large format) without the paper going all wavy or the overall color scheme falling apart requires layering. 

As in, I started with mostly gray and sepia hues, and then slowly added blues (the pigments for those are softer than most purple tones) to define shadows and lights. 

You can't 'erase' what you've already put on paper, so a careful and slooow approach works best. 

Only when the general form of all individual objects and the lighting are sorted out, the brand's name-sake color came into play. 

While I wanted the overall look to be soft and elegant, I still needed the borders to be crisp or the whole thing would just look like a mint-and-purple cloud. :')

So my smallest brush carried the picture on its, maybe, three hairs. 

(I've since bought a new one, it got all worn out over the year. RIP.)

For the digital close-ups, I scanned the A3 picture on 600 DPI, did the whole post-processing marathon in Photoshop, and then added additional color layers to play up the purple and mint.

I was especially excited for the shiny, sleek packaging design of the brand in combination with the more subdued book pages in the back. 

Writing with a brush is always fun, too!

The Neck Cream has to be my favorite part. I wanted to let the page in the background look like something out of an illustrated fairy tale book or a high-fantasy novel, and am happy with how the white spaces turned out. 

For some of the white-on-color details I used a white pigment with a nib pen to get a cleaner result.

This is the banner collage for the website. I didn't know about the precise format ahead of time, so there was a quite a bit of cutting, masking and moving about involved. 

I got the real thing, too! 

These sheetmasks are HUGE. Seriously, have a comparison picture with my grumpy cat Hedwig.

Already excited to use this multi-faceted product. The 5 Steps To Lovely Skin includes a Cleansing Foam, an Ampoule, a Sheet Mask (of course!), a Facial Cream and a Neck Cream, so it's like a deluxe sample set perfect for traveling.

.... now I need the time to go traveling, though.

That's it for this little look at work! See you again in April!

Just a little preview for the next sticker set here:

A spring edition, but psst! ;) Should be ready and printed in about two weeks.

You can find my previous stickers on my Etsy shop here~