Today's #sketch is a sweet concept piece from Brown Bag Dublin based 2D Designer Gavin O'Donnell, created as part of his #masterstudychallenge on Instagram!

Gavin: I wanted to create a piece inspired by the heatwave we're having lately and combine this with some kind of animal. I've also been very inspired by Goro Fujita's work for a long time, so I wanted to try and create a piece in the kind of style he uses. So, bold colours and stylised characters.

I started off with a line drawing to get a general idea of the composition and character. Following this, I made a moodboard. (A moodboard is a bunch of images from various sources compiled into one to give the artist ideas on what direction to take the artwork in).

So using my moodboard for inspiration, I worked on the image for a few days on and off until I reached a point where I couldn't see any way to make the image stronger. This is a good point at which to ask another artist for feedback. So I asked my art director (Phil McDarby) for some feedback near the end of the piece to see if I was missing anything. Phil pointed me in the right direction; one of the many things I'm still getting my head around is value structure. The simplest way to explain this is if you break the image up into foreground, middleground and background. In order to make the depth and relationship read between the three parts you need to have a value structure. So for example, the foreground could be predominately black tones, the middleground greys and the background whites. This could also be reversed, or any other arrangement of the three values will work.

By restricting your values in these areas you make the silhouettes easier to read and reinforce the sense of depth, which is pretty vital. There's always an exception somewhere but it's a good rule of thumb to go by. So I worked on the values in this piece to make the image read better and reinforce the focal point.

I used Photoshop and Procreate to make the image.