Artwork Feature #2: Pete Harrison - Advent

This is part of our new weekly series of posts. Here we feature a selected piece of art and have a little chat with the designer who made it. They give us a bit of background information and details about how the work was conceptualized and created.

Im a great fan of Pete Harrison aka aeiko and i've worked several time with him like in the interview for abduzeedo a couple of months ago. He is an awesome artists with lots of great stuff but i think "Advent" is one of my favourite designs. This piece is a collaboration with Eric Sin. Stay tuned for next week. We have some super stuff coming.

Pete Harrison about "Advent".

Well Eric send me this really cool looking organic render, it was in landscape and looked interesting, I knew I had to work with it, so I asked him and he gave me the go ahead to make this into a collaboration. I knew I could make it even more interesting. add some drama and some more abstraction into the design.

First of all i started on the background, I just got into Photoshop and created loads of circles all over the canvas, made some stroked, made some dashed stroked one's in illustrator and imported those too! I placed these around the artwork in the background. I then decided it could be more effective if the artwork was portrait so I changed its orientation!

I grabbed eric's render and ran it through a few displacement maps to give it that more organic decaying effect, the problem I had was it wasnt enough, so I grabbed some black paint stock's and cut them up and added these into the composition, making some of the render in shadow so you could see they were from the same object. I am always big on colour, so ran through a few colour options, eventually settling on the green / red combo with some grey showing through in the background. I blurred the whole canvas and erased some areas - this was just to give it a bit more depth! The design is a few years old now, but has got very good reactions, it was a personal work for fun, Eric and I enjoyed the finished product.

Pete Harrison has a personal homepage, a Deviantaccount and his two clothing labels Funkrush and SuperCombo.