Flat illustration is everywhere. Think of traffic signs. The pictures are clean, simple, not too much detail and it’s easy to tell what it is from a glance.

I’m going to draw three scenes from The Little Match Girl that have different mood and focal points from each other. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the story.

 

We’ll talk about the main focus, choosing color schemes and how it all works in flat illustration style.

 

I recommend to check the video version below for the timelapse.

Tools and Style

Flat illustration is usually lineless. You can draw it freely with any Pen, Brush or just use Lasso Tool and fill. You can also use Figure tool to draw smooth outlines.

Textured brushes like Chalk, Pastel and stuff works great too if that’s what you prefer.

I’m using my favorite modified Mapping Pen and Hard Eraser, plus Gradient tool and Tone Scraping airbrush for other effects.

It’s okay to shade the illustration with either cell shading or gradient, but remember that flat illustration should look flat. Draw the shading in a way that doesn’t give the illustration much sense of depth.

If you’re using gradient, use it mindfully. We want the shapes look sharp, too much gradient can muddy the colors.

Color Scheme

Because of its lineless nature, color is very important. You can’t cheat by using line art to separate items of similar colors.

That’s when contrast came in. May it be shape contrast or color contrast, our eyes are drawn to something that is unusual. And to look unusual, the main focus should be different from its surroundings.

Color is our greatest weapon. When talking about colors, use there are four kinds of contrast.

 

1. Colored versus grayscale. Which is pretty much the same as...

2. Saturated versus desaturated.

3. Warm versus Cool.

But the most important of them all is values. I’ll explain about values right after choosing the colors.

Choosing the color scheme was a nightmare for me. Knowing about color theory is one thing, but how do we choose the colors?

 

My tip is to choose the color that will dominate most space in the illustration first.

The scenes happen at night, the surrounding will be in blue. Thus blue will dominate and become our first color.

 

In color theory, we have plenty of colors that work great with blue. And plenty that don’t. This helps us eliminate a lot of probabilities.

Warm colors are attention grabbing and a good contrast for the cool blue.

It’s a good idea to have some in the illustration, particularly for our main character. This eliminates color harmonies that only have cool colors.

Now that we have less, decide how much hue you want to use. For this illustration, two is too little and four is too much. Let’s stick with three.

Only two left. It’s winter so using green would be weird and I don’t feel like using pink, so the winner is Split Complementary.

Congratulations, we’ve got ourselves a color scheme!

 

I hope this tip can help you when you’re stuck choosing colors for your art.

Planning Stage

Let’s paint a rough draft real quick. I’m trying out the colors and fleshing out the characters and environment in this step because I’d hate to stumble when drawing the real thing. First, because this isn’t a cheerful story, I avoid picking saturated colors.

• For lights through the window, we’ll use washed out yellow.

 

• The snow is in light blue instead of white. I tend to avoid pure white and pure black in my colored illustrations.

 

• To draw the viewer’s eyes to the girl we’re going to use warmer colors that a bit more saturated and brighter while the passerby look washed out and blueish compared to her.

 

• For the star, light saturated yellow compared to the windows and a little glow.

 

• For the last picture where the girl and her grandma fly to heaven, I choose to bath them in warm light with gradient using the shooting star’s colors.

To see if the colors are working, check the values. Go to Layer Property>Expression Color>Gray.

It will change your colored picture into grayscale.

Value is how light or dark a hue can be. Different colors can have similar values, which isn’t good for flat illustration. It’s important for different shapes to have different values.

For example, the colors of the girl’s headscarf and the window has similar values.

I used Hue/Saturation/Luminosity and increased the brightness to make it lighter. It increases the visibility.

Go back Layer Property>Expression Color, this time choose “Color” and see the change. The changes you make in grayscale mode will be carried to Color mode.

Sketch

For the first picture, the poor girl is chasing someone down the street, trying to sell her matches. I’ll make it in top down view to show the narrow alley and to fit more information to the illustration.

The second picture is the scene when the girl saw a shooting star and reminded of her kind grandma.

 

The focal point is the shooting star and we’re going to put the camera behind the girl to tell the viewer that the girl is looking up there.

 

The lights on the buildings are all off to tell the viewers that even when the town goes to sleep, the girl is still out there in the cold.

There’s too much empty space in this long shot that makes it hard to focus on the star, so I shortened it up a little.

The star and the girl are on the opposite sides to balance the illustration.

If the girl is right under the star, there’d be empty space that makes the illustration looks like it’s too heavy on one side.

 

Not a good composition.

The last one is when she meets her grandmother in the afterlife.

Since the illustration starts on the left, I put the girl and the grandma on the top right to go with the flow.

The girl in the alley is on the bottom left of the third illustration. the main focus is them flying to heaven, make the girl on earth blends with the colors of the environment.

 

Because of the position of the girl (the alley one) in the third illustration, I flipped the second illustration for consistency.

Let’s check the values of the three illustrations. Looks okay. Time to finalize.

Finalizing

Let’s add some shadow at the top and bottom of the first illustration. Then some on the buildings to frame the girl better.

Second illustration, add some lighter blue streaks to the sky to make it less empty and liquify the building to straighten it.

For the third one, the earth girl’s head is made smaller and the contrast of the flying scene increased.

One last test before we clean up the illustrations is the Squint test.

The purpose of this test is to determine if the focal point of the illustration is not being distracted by anything in the environment.

 

The manual way to do it is to move away from the screen, squint your eyes and look at the illustrations.

Blurring the illustrations with Gaussian Blur can also work.

As we can see, the first illustration doesn’t quite pass the Squint test. The light from the windows and the girl are battling for attention. The other two though, passed with flying colors.

 

I changed the colors of the windows in the final version.

Let’s check the color values and do another Squint test to make sure everything works out well.

I made the girl’s dress in the first illustration darker to make her pop more. Onto the squint test...

Illustration one barely passed the Squint test.

 

The girl’s red dress and headscarf barely grabbed more attention than the window lights, so I chose to turn off the light on her right and draw a new window with light at the bottom left of the first illustration.

And, we’re done! I hope you learn something new.

 

See you on the next tutorial!