Pride & Prejudice Illustration, 2021

For part of my final in my Drawing Foundations course, I decided to do a mixed media piece based on one of my favorite books, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

The illustration features Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, as portrayed by Kiera Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 movie adaptation of the book.

Pride and Prejudice is a title really close to my heart. I especially love the emotional adaptation that the 2005 movie pulled off, so I wanted to use this piece to give tribute to the title as a whole. I have ambivalent feelings about ink as a medium. I love that it can be refined or messy on the page. I love looking at ink pieces. It’s a challenging and fun medium for me, and I felt like it was a good pair for the mixed feelings the characters in Pride and Prejudice work through. For my second medium, I chose to work with pencil because I like the additional texture it created.

I’ve included one of my early thumbnails for the piece. In this early sketch, I considered cutting Darcy, but then soon reconsidered. He’s a major player in the book and one of my favorite literary characters!

I completed my sketches of the characters before moving on to the environment. This piece is about the size of a piece of posterboard, so I did most of my sketching on the ground. I masked out the entirety of the grass using masking tape. It created this really wonderful texture for the grass/plants in the foreground.

Using ink in the sky allowed me to also create a wonderful cloudy/blooming sky, giving the background its own distinct feeling. One of my big focuses was creating a distinct foreground, midground, and background. Using different mediums and techniques allowed me to accomplish that goal and create a piece I really love. I finished shading and rendering the characters after the ink dried. I used photos from the movies to aid me.

Role: Illustrator | Tools: Pencil & Ink