STRIVE: Canyon Path
Featured from “SYNDICATE XVI” 2025 Illustration MFA Visual Thesis Exhibition, FIT
One of the other aspects of exploring I wanted to include in Strive was that not every location is a stationery place, some of them are purely travel routes. I wanted to represent a seemingly beautiful canyon, with narrow paths forward. I originally sketched a traveler with a horse hesitant about the carrion birds ahead, but decided that not every landscape needed a traveler in it to define scale.
Medium: Digital, Photoshop.
Process: The final digital piece came together from a digital sketch into a loose render in grayscale which gets multiple layers of gradient maps and overlays to get a sense of mood and color. Everything gets merged into one layer before focusing on the final render pass.
Sketch
Card