The full sized poster version! 
A flier sized for putting up around town.
Zoomed in version of the snowglobe. I made use of internal
glow on the bulbs, the pen tool, plus a gradient with
transparencey. There’s also some textures on the globe. Plus,
a folded paper texture for the background.
Here, you can see how the transparency works. The background provides need contrast for the snowglobe.

Some skills I used in Illustrator with this design:

  • Proof Setup under the View menu lets you see approximately what a design would look like for the colorblind. I had a more bright teal color as the background but my very colorblind boyfriend found the poster “confusing.” This prompted me to find this option.
  • Transparent gradients; I knew they existed but this was my first use-case trying to approximate a snowglobe.
  • Inner and Outer Glow were helpful effects for the lightbulbs. I tried using a free brush tool to make them but I could not get the spacing right. So I created a bulb myself. I also tried red and green bulbs but they didn’t pop with the design.
  • The divide tool came in handy here to make sure the glob stand fit perfectly and did not show through the texture and transparency.

    • This is on of my early attempts at a full sized poster and they did end up using. It’s one of my least favorite posters because it feels cluttered!
    I enjoy painting with watercolors and think these came out well.

    But, getting them into Canva was a pain in the ass. Never again.
    I also hand painted all these elements with a Viviva watercolor set.

    The highlights on the cactus come from a white colored pencil.
    A rainbow drawn in illustrator with their basic watercolor brushes.

    May I’d do this next time. But it’s not QUITE wat I was looking for.
    The original sketch idea based on a spec.

This design was made with watercolors and ink plus Canva. It was tedious. Here's why...

  • I love painting with watercolors. Frankly, working in Illustrator is taking me away from physical mediums. But, it takes TIME to do work like this.
  • HOW do people scan art into design programs and make it look good? This was such a challenge. Add to that, Canva is just clunky. Isolating the designs from the paper was cumbersome without vector art and anchor points to manipulate.
  • I also wasn’t that into how it turned out. It looks cheesy to me now. I do like the original sketch idea I had for it tho. Probably should have made a more stylized version, however. Maybe someday, I’ll take another look at this for fun.