For the final project in Illustration, we had the opportunity to create a work to put in our portfolio. Due to a love of birds and stickers, I decided to combine the two and task myself with creating a bird sticker sheet. I wanted to challenge myself by creating a 4″ x 6″ sheet with five or six birds that could stand alone, and the individual items for stickers that work cohesively with the birds. To do this, I started by choosing the different birds I wanted to illustrate and then sketched out some ideas.
Sketch #1 
Sketch #2
Originally, I was going to go with the styling of the birds above, however I did not like the direction they were going so I switched. The style I decided to use I have developed over the past few months, into one that works well with my new love of minimal detail.
After many different renditions, that I unfortunately did not save in the right format, I arrived at my final solution below.
In the style I have been working with, I use reference images to draw the birds with minimal colors and lines to hint at what type of bird they are. Each element of the sticker sheet is hand drawn down to the outline of the leaves and the spots on the seeds. The difference with these stickers, that is normally absent in my developed style, is the white background and the loosely filled color for the birds’ bodies. Generally, my illustrations are on a black background so it was a bit of a challenge for me to work around not using white as a line color.
Here is a link to my Illustration portfolio:
http://illustration.emay.knight.domains/illustration-portfolio/
