Adjusted Images
This section has mostly been dedicated to making adjustments to previous work and adding some colored characters. Some mistakes were made in my approach, mostly in the aspect of organization. The results themselves are a little wonky because of my lack of clarity/direction at the beginning of this particular section. I ended up working in bits and pieces on each image and didn’t quite get any one of them to a place where I’m happy with the result. Good progress was made, however. I now do have a good collection of images I’m willing to use for this presentation.
I tweaked the lights and the background a bit. The previous image is a bit flat, so the shape of the throne is meant to give the composition a sense of grandeur because it forces the eye to move up and down instead of side to side.
Had quite a bit of trouble with this. I’m not quite happy with how I’ve lit the composition. Though I tried to play around with more shadows and pushing back the background with light and it all just ended up looking more muddy. The magic is much better though. Gold works with the color scheme and the crowns on the princes’ heads. I also added more detail to the dress because the difference in texture really helps with the depth.
This is one of the images from the previous sections, which I’ve now overpainted. The more comic-book-esque style was an experiment, but I figured I could still use the image once I’ve made it more stylistically similar to the images I’ve been painting recently. Painting over it was an interesting experience because of the dark darks I used for the initial image. It’s also worth noting that the characters have been changing as I’ve been drawing and re-drawing them. Verner’s coat, for one. I’ll probably go back and make some changes later.
Still not quite happy with this, though the depth is better. I seem to overlook depth when I draw things in the first stages, as one can see that the trees are dark enough to blend with the characters in the black and white version. I tried to give things a green/golden glow for foresty sunlit scene, but I think it might have too much of the green and not enough of the golden. I do like the characters though and I think I would like to figure out how to paint this sort of sunlight angle properly, so I’ll go back to it.
The book cover, redone. My tutor recommended using some hand-lettering to make a more cohesive visual language, since my art style doesn’t mesh well with the shiny, clean style of the title I’ve been using so far. The image is from one of the mock-up “trailer” images. The first version of the text is the one with the modge-podge of fonts I’ve been using so far and the second is my hand-lettered version. It looks more than a little rough, though the idea isn’t bad. I think I might round it out a little more in places because I don’t want to give the impression of thorns, as it rather does now. I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate the feather nicely, I think I’ll do that with a more traditional looking font. The squashed and stretched letters look a bit too playful, so I’ll adopt some of the elements like the shapes of the a‘s and e‘s as well as the tails on the v and s, but I’ll straighten out the n and t and make the r‘s a little less bulbous.
Characters in color
The presentation needs a little more color in the section with the characters. I’m envisioning a full-body drawing of each character in color with a description next to them and the black and white sketches just below. It’s interesting to see how much better I’ve gotten to know these characters and all the ways the previous designs don’t quite match up anymore. When I drew the black and white sketches, didn’t even have a color palleted figured out for them, let alone a consistent shape language. Or style. Which I still haven’t quite figured out, but I’ve come a long way from the very first “vignette” drawings. I now have a much better idea of the drawing and rendering process for this story and I think one can tell form the way I drew these two characters. If this were a real project pitch I would need to redo the black and white sketches as well, in order to have complete consistency, but for the purposes of this project it’s better to see how the characters have evolved as I’ve worked on them.
Unfortunately, I was not very well organized and have only a couple of characters in their completed versions. The rest are in sketch stage.
Mock up for character profiles.
Mock up for whole project.
Conclusion:
Something really worth noting for this section is the way I handled, or didn’t handle, my time management. I’ve noticed that every time I enter the end of a project, I always get really stuck in my head and find it difficult to continue/end. I also took upon myself to finish/do many small, different tasks and was not clear enough on what I wanted my end results to be, which definitely contributed to my slow progress. This is something I will have to keep in mind for every single project I have from now on. Especially big projects like this one. I find it difficult to let it go and more difficult to step back and evaluate what needs to be done in order to finish and not what needs to be done in order for the project to be “good”. “Good” as in “perfect” because my brain just works like that.
I think a lot of artists struggle with the definition of “good enough”. My personal definition needs tuning because I have stretched deadlines too often in pursuit of “good enough”. A lot of people say to make things “finished” and not “perfect” instead of “good enough” and I think this is a better way to look at it, but it still fails in the same manner when someone like me has a different definition of what is presentable and what is not. I would consider pretty much all I made on this post to not be presentable or “finished”. Allowing myself to have a less polished version of my own work can and should be part of the process, and it was definitely appropriate here, so the unnecessary stress really was not worth it.
Note for the next section:
The next part will focus on the graphic novel. I will select some pages and finish them up in order to have a sample of what those might look like as a final product.
