‘In Love with the World’ Illustration inspired (Anicka Yin’s exhibition at Tate Modern)

This year I have been wanting to challenge myself to create more illustrative landscapes and after my visit at the Tate modern and experiencing Anicka Yin’s in Love with the world, I felt inspired to create this illustration.

I started by tracing over the aerobes from a photograph I took during my visit. One of the great parts of this exhibition is that you can experience it from many different levels within the space of the Tate modern… when I was looking at it through the glass I felt like a child in an aquarium and that’s where the main subject for my illustration came from.

As you can see, I drew very minimal sea creatures around the aerobes as I wanted them to stand out and be the main subject 

I then created a colour pallet that would bring this image to life

For the colouring process, instead of making a crisp outline, I tried colour blocking each shape for this I used my favourite brush pack ‘storybook’ for procreate I love this brush pack because you can achieve a very illustrative look   

During the process, I keep changing my image to black and white to check on the values to see if it was better for the eye to read, however I stopped doing this after looking at one of my child’s books and realising that an underwater world could have many different colours

For the water, I wanted to use a gradient of many shades of a light blue going to green tint, I also wanted to create movement and textures by using white highlights and blending them with texture as well as turning the opacity down, this helped me to achieve a sense of movement in the water due by the underwater creatures.

For the aerobes, I tried making them more transparent looking almost like jellyfish, I also added colour shades and blending them to create a gradient

I colour blocked each sea creature with all sorts of colours within my colour pallet, I decided to give them plane white eyes almost soulless and robotic looking, as one of the main questions that Anicka ask through her vision is ‘what would it feel like to share the world with machines that could live in the wild and evolve on their own? 

I finalise this illustration by creating some light radiating through the water as well as some glass reflection and finally creating more windows in the background from different angles to emphasize the sense that you can experience these creatures from many different levels within the space

And TADA! That’s it. Thank you if you’ve made it this far, I really enjoyed the process and I hope you did too. 

In Love with the World (Anicka Yin’s exhibition inspired), Digital Illustration, 2022