The Spectrum Contest

Hello and thanks for being patient. :-)  I have been meaning to get back to this blog since last Wednesday- it's in danger of becoming one of my more short-lived experiments...

It's a little past 11:17- I just got home from head drawing class. One of the several self-serving purposes of this blog is to help me see what my level of progress is (as a motivational tool, in other words.) Below are two head drawings. The first one is the head drawing from tonight. The second is one that I really liked from about a year ago.

11-15-2010

11-??-2009

To me, it seems like the newer images has some advantages: It's at a more consistent level of finish throughout the drawing- The mouth, nose, eyes, etc are all "working" together somewhat (though not as well as I'd like.) The older one has some funky areas where it looks like I threw some tone down hoping I would be able to fix it later. (See the left side of the neck below the too-small ear.) The first drawing also has somewhat superior structure in the mouth and browline area, and has better symmetry overall. (Especially the eyes.)

I'm still making the bridge of the nose too wide though, gotta remember that for next time.

Anyway, getting back to the purpose of this post: The Spectrum contest: For this years contest I am making my first-ever illustration, following a process that I will post step by step as the weeks roll by until I submit my entry (if it's not too embarrassing) by January 8th, the deadline.

I don't want to be up until 1am, so I am going to run through the first step in the process tonight, and follow up with the rest of the steps I have taken later in the week.

For most illustrators, the ideation process begins with thumbnails. I didn't know what I wanted to paint right away, so I started out cycling through a bunch of ideas. At first, I thought I might kill two birds with one stone by doing an illustration based on an idea for an album cover I had for the band Scarlet Stoic involving a character with a red cloak blowing in the wind, it's torn edges ending in hands grasping forward (lower left):

After spending some time fleshing the idea out, I realized that for the purposes of an illustration, it wasn't telling a coherent story, and abandoned it as an idea for the Spectrum contest and moved on to an idea centered on my favorite animal: The Klipspringer - Highest jumping mammal. I also really like dung beetles (Yes, I know I like random animals.) I thought it might be cool to have a tribe of elves riding klipspringers doing battle with a giant menacing dung beetle-like creature... gosh, that doesn't really sound cool now. :-) Some of these lack narrative as well, although I sort of liked the one in the center and worked on it for a while. Ultimately I decided it wasn't dynamic enough (looking at it now I wished I had picked it because it would have been easy.)

More thumbnails, trying to come up with an idea that has action, but is also coherent and tells a story.

I lost interest in dung beetles entirely and started focusing on the klipspringers and their riders. Erik Gist encouraged me to pursue the images at right of center (the ones with the characters in midair.) He said to push the 3-dimensionality and change the angle a bit.

My vision for this painting is a group of elves with face paint and flowing hair and cloaks, riding on klipspringers at dawn. Ideally, they will look as though they are bounding through the air. I want the painting to be dreamlike. I got the go ahead from Erik on this one, and started the next step.

Stay tuned for STEP 2: The Agony of Collecting Reference

J