Inspired by the Romanticism era of intricate tapestries and the iconic work of William Morris, I illustrated Australian native birds with a vintage twist.

Research:

The range was thought up by La La Land creative director, Elie Azzi after many inspiring visits to art galleries, in particular, the unicorn tapestry exhibition that toured the Art Gallery of NSW back in 2019. The aim was to create an equally dreamy artwork with an Australian influence that we could apply onto mugs, melamine sets, and giftware to launch as a fully stocked new range at our bi-annual tradeshow.

Through my own research, I reviewed the styles, colours and techniques William Morris employed on his iconic tapestry and print designs paying special attention to his stylised use of flora and how he seamlessly created beautiful patterns that seemed both organic and organised all at once.

I also discovered an incredibly useful resource via Flickr account of Biodiversity Heritage. This incredibly in-depth catalogue of biodiversity literature which was created for ‘serendipitous discovery’ was a fantastic resource where I spent many hours scrolling through some of the 2 million published images.

I located some 120 year old illustrations of native Australian birds which worked as an excellent reference point for both style (as I wanted to reference the relevant era of illustration) and form so I could base my illustrations off the original era’s proportions of the birds.

Using this approach I also located some excellent Australian plant references along with less Australian, but more ornamental florals to illustrate too.

How I illustrated the birds:

Each element within my design is illustrated using these following steps.

• Using my Cintiq Wacom Tablet and Adobe Photoshop, I carefully illustrate a ‘pencil’ like drawing of the subject, in this example it’s a bird.
  

• Then, on layers beneath my ‘pencil sketch’ layer, I use the pen-tool to add solid colours and the dodge (lighten) and burn (darken) tool to create highlights and shadows in the solid colour, allowing for more clarity and dimension.

• I then save this file with no background layer and use it in my final composition when arranging all my elements together! I like to work this way so that I can easily condense my ‘working layers’ into one focused element e.g. this Crimson Rosella whilst allowing myself the flexible option to return to the original bird file to edit it should I need to.

• With all my elements such as flowers, leaves, birds etc. illustrated like the example I gave above, I work to the dimensions of each product the illustrations will end up on such as a mug, and create a unique layout that showcases all the elements harmoniously (duplicating elements where I need to in order to help create patterns too!)

Hopefully the above information is interesting to some or useful to others! I employ many different illustration styles and techniques when creating custom work for La La Land depending on what the brief may be, but this style of illustration is definitely one of my favourites and if you’ve got the tools to create it I definitely recommend you give it a try!

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