I had the privilege of taking part of Drip for Drip's 2022 Group Show, creating a coffee cup design together with 20 other illustrators. The final coffee cups were displayed at Klasbak, a coffee shop in Zuidlaren, in the north of The Netherlands.

Theme and colours

This year's theme was "October" and together with the bride we were given a limited colour palette to work with.

At first the colour scheme scared me, as I had never worked with colours that “didn’t make sense” to the topic. Thinking October/Autumn I would naturally think oranges, reds, browns, yellows and purple. But I was happy to get pushed out of my comfort zone. 

Initial Sketch

My first thought was to illustrate something to do with Halloween (naturally), so my first sketches were heavy in the spooky pumpkin department. But after sketching a couple of ideas I realised I needed to go a different route that I believed would fit the colour palette better. 

I knew I wanted to have a central element focus around coffee, so the idea became to make an illustration featuring a nice hot cup of coffee amongst autumn leaves. And to tie in the halloween aspect, the steam rising from the cup turned in to a cheeky ghost. 

After some rough sketches, I knew that I would need to move over to illustrator for the composition to take place. I’m not really good at composition while sketching, I feel it comes more natural to play with it in Illustrator and let if form from there. 

While I was trying to block out the colours and shapes, I realised I wanted some elements of white to break up the colours, they eventually turned in to small ghosts playing among the leaves.

Details and final illustration

After I found the composition and illustrated the elements needed, I had planned on leaving it there. All flat and solid colours. But then I thought, why not use this opportunity to learn something new and push myself a bit further? So I decided to try out textures and brushes, two things I have rarely used in illustrations. 

So slowly I started adding textures to the background and brush effects to the leaves in order to lift them up a bit. I’m so happy and proud of how it turned out! 

Shout out to Wijtze for putting this amazing show together, and to all the other illustrators who made amazing cups!

Check out the who show over at Drip for Drip.