Are you ready to search for more treasures with Django? The theme for our upcomingDjango course, Digging Into Django, plays off of the Indiana Jones movies, where adventure and treasures await in the jungle.
For the Digging Into Django theme, I tried to be little more intentional with my approach and really sketch out how I wanted things to look. I used a mix of Photoshop, Illustrator, and the Procreate app for the final product.
Even the final-ish sketch above contains different ideas that are layered upon one another ― and it took many iterations to get to that point. Using the Procreate app on the iPad, I sketched out the very basics. I wanted the temple as a focal point in the background, and I wanted something in the foreground. And golden monkeys. I definitely needed golden monkeys.
To get the lighting right, I roughed out some values of light and dark.
In the foreground, there are just three basic plant shapes scaled and rotated in different directions.
These plants:
I arranged them so they would frame the center, and then I added in orange highlights on the interior edges and shadows where needed.
Next came the pillars, which were drawn out in Procreate and cleaned up in Photoshop.
Then I added in a temple drawn from El Castillo in Chichen Itza.
And last, but certainly not least, a few golden monkeys.
And now we have the final image used for the title card.
One of my favorite features of Procreate is that it can record every move you make and, at any point, you can export a video of your process on a particular image. This is just one of the files I had for the course title image. It records everything so you can see the random things I do in the beginning before I get going. I use those hanging plants eventually ― just not in the title image. In this particular video, I was tracing over a file I already had to clean up space.
Here, I drew out some symbols on a tablet, created completely within Procreate, for use as a course asset.
Again in Procreate, I imported one of my basic banner layouts to work on the ruins. It was faster for me to draw/paint within the app and then export it to Photoshop to finalize everything.
This is the final banner from the previous image. Once again in Photoshop, I layered on basic plant shapes to fill out the jungle. Note those hanging plants.
Digging Into Django was such a fun course to design. I feel I successfully jumped a few of the hurdles I’ve had in previous designs. All it really took was for me to truly be intentional with my process. I’m sure how I work will evolve more, but it was great to see the final product come out as I envisioned. If you like watching artwork progress without anyone talking, I’ve posted some more videos here(vimeo link). After that, make sure to keep an eye out for Digging Into Django, where you’ll learn how to build fully functioning, scalable Django web apps!