I work as an illustrator for a living. And this is one of the projects I completed a few months ago. I seldom do mural illustrations but this one was going to be blown up and printed, not painted directly on a wall, so it was closer to illustrations I often do.
This was for a newly rebranded chicken rice restaurant in Singapore. The mural had to tell the story of the brand. I got to work with my former boss from JWT Singapore, Norman Tan, which was a delight. There were a lot of decisions to be made when coming up with a look for a mural. And I was given a lot of freedom to decide on what suited the brand best. The direction the owner of the restaurant wanted was a looser drawing style, which suited me fine. Except that for loose drawings, I had to do it all in one go, without rough pencil sketches to carefully guide my lines. I had to do it urban sketcher style- from direct observation and directly with pen and ink on paper. It was more scary because if the drawing didn't look right, I had to do it over and over again until I got it right.
To do it well, I had to get into the appropriate mindset. Just draw the scene as if I were just drawing for fun, without any cares of getting it right or wrong. Just enjoy myself, enjoy the moment. And that's how I did these sketches. I had to reference photos for some of these sketches, and I did them the same way- Look at the photo as if it were a real scene, and draw it out directly with pen and ink. Thankfully, I could also do small edits and adjustments in Procreate to fine-tune the artworks further. Like, adjusting facial features or straightening a line.
I applied the colouring using a screen print approach, but I did it digitally. I used Lisa Glanz's Delicious Texture Procreate Brushes for the textures. (the link is an affiliate link* btw)I like this brash set and highly recommend it.
Here is the video on how I put it all together!
