Now that I have finalised the "big picture" for my travel app through mock designs, it is time to look at the secondary elements such as colours and Illustrations.

I decided to do illustrations before icons as they are one of the biggest parts of my travel app, and also through the illustration, I can decide on a colour scheme for the app ( since the illustration must look coherent to the rest of the app). Through the mock designs, I know I'll need the following illustration - 1 illustration of London, 1 illustration of Tokyo, a logo character, a collectable reward illustration and a map illustration.

The next thing to decide is a general illustration style. In my Illustration research blog, I looked at a vast array of artists and illustration styles that might suit what I'm looking for. At the end of that blog, I kept an open mind as I feel like I needed time to digest what I have seen before making a decision. Now that I have had time to think through it all, I have decided on a few important elements for my design;

• It is going to have thick outlines, but not as thick and not as black as what Aaron Draplin would
• The outlines will be drawn "informally", like Jimmy Liao's work, to give that hand-drawn feel
• it is going to be colourful, as flipping through children's books they are all very colour focused. I was also tempted to give my illustration a crayon effect, but I think that would have made my illustration too childish.
• i want my characters to have expressive big eyes
• It is going to have a colour background since the rest of my app will likely be mostly white, however, negative space is just as important. I will not be adding too many elements to each illustration and making it too crowded. I also hope the more minimalist approach will be a bit more put together and a bit more mature looking ( as the app is intended for a larger audience, not just for children)

With all that in mind, I started first with the logo. I had the idea of my logo being a dragon for quite a while, since it fits well with my theme of quest. My main inspiration for the overall shape of the dragon was inspired by this little character;

My first 2 attempts at drawing a dragon didn't come out as planned;

But I wasn't too dishearted as it's my first attempt at more complicated digital drawings, and thankful in the end it all came together;

The next was  choosing the colour, this bit was a little tricky to figure out and I tried a lot of different combinations to finally figure out the best fit;

One of the tools that really helped me was Adobe colours. As you can see, in every one of my different colour trials I had a screenshot of the trends page in adobe colours. It's a quick and easy way to try out many colours using the eyedropper tool and look at the most recent trends.

In the end, I decide on this colour combination ;