Autumn Silhouette

About my autumn silhouette project

Our theme this month is “Autumn Silhouette”.

I struggled for a bit with what I wanted to do, but each time I let my mind wander over ideas I got taken back to the mountains surrounding our city. Being in Washington, we have a ton of trees. While many of those do stay green all year, we still get pops of browns, oranges, and reds during the Fall season. My first locked-in decision of the project was that I would use colors and not just a standard black and white silhouette style.

I combined some of my mental images of our surrounding area with a viewpoint from my front porch and decided to do some digital art.

How I made it

First I had to charge my iPad, which was at a cool 0%. Then I had to restart my iPad because it was running super slow. And of course app updates were waiting for me. But I summoned my inner strength to push through these insurmountable obstacles, fired up Procreate, and started drawing.

My goal was not to create anything photo real (because I can’t) so I decided to draw from memory. This also allowed me to not get up from the couch to look at any reference views out my front door.

I drew starting from the closest object and pushed out. First I created a simple porch structure, making life easy by not including the floor or roof of our covered front porch. I added a little bend of a sidewalk and some bushes near the porch to add some recognizable “our yard” features. Then I kept pushing out, adding progressively brighter layers to build to a top sunlight.

I liked but didn’t love the result. That is, until I added a “light shadow” to the porch structure. This little pop of purple acted like edge highlighting, really selling the sunrise. The look also shifted and felt a bit more pixelart.

This was a quick project with no real plan. Just draw. I like how it turned out and it reminds me of home.