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4. The Background

Until this point, I still wasn’t sure if I’d make a outdoor or indoor vector of this piece and that’s why I kept the overall shading rather neutral, so if I decide to add a sky background to it or whatever, I don’t need to change everything. However, I decided to do an indoor background. I wanted them to stay in front of a simple wallpaper at this time, so I created a new layer filled it with an appropriate color and gave the whole thing a pretty simple structure:

Now, even if the coloring of the two persons is quite neutral and would almost allow me to leave the background like it is right now, it still looked a lot too clean to me. So I gave the background a little bit of shading, too:

I chose a darker value of the background color only (not a darker shade of the stripe’s color), because that saved me a lot of time and looked more natural. I handled the transparency of the background shading exactly like all the other shades. Opacity values went from 40% down to 10% in this case. Now that the shading is applied, the vector gets a lot more value:

I was about to call this a wrap when I thought that the design of the wallpaper would probably be a bit too uninteresting, because there’s no detail on it whatsoever. So I opened up a new document within Illustrator and created a random shape:

At first I had only one part of this shape after I basically just clicked and dragged the mouse around with the pen tool, because I wanted something really random. Then I just copied this shape, pasted two copies of it and moved and rotated them around until a shape turned out that I liked. I then grouped this shape copied it and returned to my vector painting. Creating a new layer I started to paste the shape I just created a couple of times and spread it all over the background:

But only estimated the correct placement, because I didn’t want the wallpaper to look 100% perfect and linear. The only problem was, that the shapes actually looked really generic and you could totally tell that they were just copy and pasted all over the background. Therefore I started to rotate almost every shape in different directions as you can see here:

The Difference between both arrangements might not be the biggest one, but it is still there.
Last but not least, I selected all shapes, gave them the same color the background shade had and reduced their opacity:

Transparency is a really nice feature in both programs. You don’t have to adjust your color palette all the time but only need to reduce or increase the opacity of a shape. And you only need a few colors and after all, this will affect your final file size in a positive way.

Proceed to step 5

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