Small Lake

This was one of the terrain tile illustrations in the board game, Xorakus. It’s a digital drawing that I made using Adobe software on the iPad Pro.

After looking at a few reference images of small lakes from above, I sketched out a few rough outlines of where the land and water would be. Then I stole a bunch of the rocks I had drawn for another terrain tile called “Boulder Field” and pasted them in across the bottom of the lake and around some of the edges. Then I began adding color, starting with a deep beige-grey color because that’s the color I wanted for those rocks. Then, I added several layers of semi-transparent blue-green for the water. The edge of each water layer traces its way around some of the rocks and they become progressively larger until the final layer is the size of the lake. This lets the viewer see all of the depth of that lake. I added a few white ripples across the surface of the water. Then, I began adding vegetation, like the little green tree shapes. Finally, I added shadows, which are cast at the same angle across all of the tiles. The shadows always bring everything to life and help create a sense of depth. #illustrator