Illustration
A Family Portrait

I was commissioned by a close client to create a large illustration of a family portrait. It was not only one family but 11 in total, as it consisted of families from the mother's and father's sides. The client wanted a traditional Chinese landscape painting style, and I was free to interpret the drawing in any way I wanted. Instead of drawing real people, zodiac animals were chosen to populate the immense landscape. It was also an opportunity for me to draw cute animals! 

 

As there were many people, I decided to group the individual families and placed them in a way that the families could identify their characters easily. 

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The drawing took about 5 months to create as I had to test a lot of the composition, size, and colour of the work. The most challenging part was figuring out how to arrange the 11 families in the image and ensure the characters feel like the people. This required a lot of back and forth with the client to make sure there was a good amount of resemblance. I like the fact that some families are farmers and fishermen, and this made it easy to illustrate them in the landscape.

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It is one of the most complex works I have ever done, and I am grateful to have had this opportunity. 

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Below are a few sketches of the work:

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