The Mountains
New pieces from the series Illustrated States of America, for the states of the Mountain Region of the United States. Check them out here, at my store!
This series mixes traditional oil painted media and digital collage work in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Decided to try a new approach here with the digitally combined collage, basically scanning in the line drawing of each state and some painted textures. Much quicker than painting all fifty states individually, and an exercise in using Adobe Photoshop again, since my exposure recently has been lacking.
Shown here are the states Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming.
aaronscanvas 
Wow, these are awesome, what a great idea. Are you going to do them all?
The shapes to the different states are very interesting.
Love the one little irregular bit on New Mexico and love the diagonal line of Nevada.
Seriously great work Aaron 🙂
Thanks! I sure am doing them all. Well, have done them all. Now I’m just slowly getting them up in the ol’ store. I decided to do this on a whim, and was originally going to paint every single one separately, but decided that would be a lot of work and time.
Actually drawing has been fun, especially getting all the intricacies of the state lines! Just wait till we get to the lake states and the east coast. some interesting shapes there. I do miss just actually drawing. Need to get back into sketchbooking.
I tried a different approach with these. I have been thinking for awhile about incorporating some digital collage style into my work with pre-made textures. So for this one I created six varying textures and one flat color for the background and scanned them all in and used them for the actual states. I drew the outlines by hand and then scanned them in as well, created the image in photoshop, and then assembled in illustrator.
I am thinking down the road to do some countries as well, like the eurozone countries, australia, japan, new zealand, china, russia, india, canada, and mexico to start, perhaps. So much work! but fun.
Thanks again for the encouragement!