There are some really beautiful textures being woven together in Will Long’s illustrations. Using a mixture of pencil work, scanned-in surfaces and Photoshop elements, he creates these moody, often chilling scenes. We’re enjoying the cinematic quality and sense of stillness in them. He tells us more about his process.
“My work usually originates as pencil sketches with varying degrees of detail. Everything after the sketches is done on Photoshop. Some sketches I work from and others I scan in and work on top of.
By this stage I normally have a loose frame to build up and I lay out shapes with the polygonal lasso. I use a Wacom tablet and custom brushes to make textures or refine the shapes. I’ve also got a bunch of scanned textures, which I sometimes bring in, and on recent projects I’ve blended the white and light greys away, cut bits out and rearranged them.
At the end, I like to merge everything and blend it with a texture, or drop very low transparency colour layers over the top. The picture seems to sit better as a ‘whole’ afterwards— I think that’s just to satisfy myself and make it easier to leave it alone.”
© Will Long, 2011
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