I’m getting back into the rhythm of drawing after a short break. Last year there were times it felt like I pushed too hard to maintain a high level of personal productivity while I adjusted to post-work life, and I eventually flamed out. So now I’m back at it with lessons learned, a refreshed perspective, and a growing pile of ideas. 

To kick things off, this relatively quick piece was partially inspired by the brilliant work of illustrator Tom Whalen (strongstuff.net), a master of pop poster compositions whose signature use of geometric precision and curated palettes has been bouncing around in my head lately. Regarding the color scheme, I recently realized that the poster art for some favorite games I’m playing these days happen to share a common palette of vibrant pinks, purples and blues (see below), and I wanted to incorporate a similar set of hues into something new and different. I won’t be surprised if I revisit this color combo again in some future projects. 

I actually used Figma for the technical line work before exporting it all to Illustrator to work on color and tighten things up; I’m just more efficient in Figma when it comes to working with repeating geometric shapes, and repurposing objects on the fly. This is more about my own lack of expertise with Illustrator rather than what it can and can’t do. I also converted all the strokes I drew into shape outlines, so I could fiddle with colors globally by tweaking just the shape fill properties once the pieces were in Illustrator. More soon…