How To Capture Mood In Your Art

Taraneh Karimi shares her process for creating illustrations to convey mood and emotion, helping to connect her work with the audience

- Taraneh Karimi

There’s magic in simplicity. I often study traditional Japanese paintings of beautiful landscapes with simple shades and colours. They’re a huge source of inspiration when illustrating mood.

I created this image as part of a pitch for a story to an animation studio. This was not the only image in the presentation, but my contribution was to find a way to create a mood image and convey how the story will feel like, bearing in mind the visual style of the proposed animated story.

My favourite part of creating an image is to achieve mood through colours, and have the audience feel what I feel. You could call it taking a more poetic approach to painting, rather than simply churning out artworks for production purposes.

To convey the mood I have in mind, I search for references that match the art direction. In this case it’s mostly traditional Japanese art and nature photography. I’m keen to push the realism because this will enable the viewer to connect with the art and the story it’s telling. I use depth in the background and a focal point in the foreground to make it easy to read the story, and use colour and light to add the mood magic!

How I create…

A RESTFUL IMAGE IN A RAIN FOREST

1 Capturing the composition