Peter & The Wolf 5: Illustration & Too Many Words Edition

As promised, here are the two illustrations I was able to complete, I wanted to post some process stuff, as that's what this blog is for, hence the separate post. 

The story of Peter & the Wolf is very basic, the majority of it is the music and your imagination, but for illustrative purposes I switched it up a bit.

Peter and Duck are friends, bros even, they leave home one bright happy morning to adventure in the woods nearby, they stop for a snack, the wolf sees the duck and he likes what he sees.
He attacks, the duck is eaten, Peter runs away in fear, unable to save his friend.
Now Peter has other animal friends, and he wants to get his revenge on the wolf, so enlists the help of Bird to capture the wolf.

Now here's the fun(??) part!

HOW I MANAGED TO DO THESE I GUESS???

I posted these in a previous post, but these were some early thumbnails:

I liked them chilling in the field with a menacing wolf somewhere and then switching it so Peter was the one doing the 'hunting'. So I chose my thumbnails based on that.

THE FIRST ONE

I kind of based this on this thumbnail, although, although that changed somewhat, it was more the idea behind it, Peter & Duck are unsuspecting and the wolf is sneaky.

Some color thumbs, I liked the idea of the grass being gold so that was a color I tried to keep in most of these (tried green for funsies)

Then I just went ahead and painted it.

THE NEXT ONE

This one was the bane of my existence for a while. I had such a hard time with the color, value, composition, and everything.

So this was my initial sketch, the thing on the tree branch is the cat (when she was in the story)

Some color thumbnails, I probably did the local colors for this one 50000 times and changed the composition as many.

Finally after asking a lot of different people for ideas, and  a lot of help from my awesome teacher. 

I picked one of the color thumbnails, and just tried to make it work, I added trees in the background, but found out they kind of messed up the composition, so out they went.  

and that's the end, I'd like to do some more on this (like a layout drawing of the yurt, I flippin love layout drawings). But there you go!

BONNUSS:

A totally unrelated robot girl at the cluuuuubbb yis

Peter & The Wolf 4 : Free At Last Edition

It's been a while, almost a month! School-wise I am almost done, just a physics final.
I was able to get pretty far on this project, I think there's a couple of things I still want to do to fill it out a bit more, especially more story moments, but this was the final turn in for the class. :D

I'm going to break this up into a few posts since this could get a bit long. So look for the illustrations in the next post!  --  check it out here!

Peter's turn around (I originally had them all painted but I liked the look of the lineart next to the 3/4)

The many faces of Peter: 

The wolf final

The wolf chilling 

The Birds!

Ducks (still want to do a character sheet for the final bird/duck)

Plants/trees! 

The next couple of posts will go over the process and final on the two story illustrations I was able to complete. It was at times was difficult and involved but good in the end?

SUPER BONUS

First attempts at some trees, I learned tree stuff while working on these!

Peter & The Wolf 3: The Wolfening : Character Edition

I've been a bit scatter brained (final semesters will do that to you!) So I've missed posting a few 'milestones' in this thing as it were. In this post I'll post the progress on the characters!

Size comparison! The wolf is still a bit too small I think.

Peter

Here's Peter at his current stage! I haven't yet completed the turn around of him in his coat. I'll add that in a separate post when it's done. :D

Some rough action poses, some better than others.  I'm pretty bad at staying on model with this guy (I seem to like making him 4 heads?)

The Wolf

Almost final character turn for the wolf! (needs a 3/4 and some color tweaks, also some texturing?)

Some wolf action! 

Peter Progress

Here's where we came from, so remember Peter in the older posts? I hadn't yet decided what to do with the guy, so this was what I did the following week:

Peter rough turn, I was pretty happy with this at the time, now I don't like his face.

Some color for Peter, feedback was these were all a bit 'dirty' which is truth.

Peter in his coat! (matches his regular outfit)

Wolf Progress

Here's where the wolf came from! Really had difficulty pushing the size of this creature at first. The wolf is the bad guy, and a threat to tiny Peter, needs to be huge.

Almost there, but not as hulking as it should be, I liked the legs/face silhouette here.

still a bit too scrawny here, figuring out the ears as well.

Better expressions than last time but NOT THERE YET.

Some wolf colors (also too dirty) I was partial to the white though. :D

A revised turn around, but again, too scrawny!

Other Things!

FINALLY here's the birds I did last week, trying to figure out color schemes and shapes, looked at a lot of Charlie Harper's stuff for inspiration. I'm leaning toward either yellow or blue depending on the final composition she ends up in.

And the duck, he needed to be fatter and rounder than I had been drawing him in my other iterations. Also tried some color stuff, I wanted to sort of hint at what Peter was wearing.

and that's it! Next up, environments?? I guess.

SUPER BONUSSS

A really really really old something from 4 years ago, rest your eyes upon the purple.

Peter & The Wolf 2: The Journey Continues

This is a little late, I finished these last week, BUT here is another roundup of these sketches. Peter slowly taking shape (SLOWLY) the wolf still refuses facial expressions and we discover that environments/layout is not my forte.

mostly the same head here, was trying out different eyes and noses though.

I wanted the wolf to look lithe and snakelike

wolf faces are hard :C

rough model sheet, some feedback I got was it needs to be more 'menacing' this wolf looks too much like a helpful wolf rather than a mean wolf

some rough environment stuff, I am bad at environments!

size tryouts, the peter on the top there was the 'winner' design wise, probably gonna go with a variation of him for the final.

SUPA BONASUUUU

An alternate coloring of the viking lady I posted over on my tumblr (bottom of the post) a bit ago. These were the first colors I chose since blue and purple are my defaults, I figured I should mix it up so I changed it to red and teal. :B

Peter & The Wolf - a lot of text and a lot of pictures

For my final semester (yay!) I'm doing an independent study. I chose to focus on visual development for a project, as there isn't really a program at the school for it, and it's something I'd like to try out and I really miss drawing. I'm sort of copying other programs at other schools I've heard of and using Mike Yamada & Victoria Ying's Rough Draft as kind of a guide.

So the thing is to pick an established story and develop the characters, environments, etc. as if it was going to go into production. I chose Peter & The Wolf by Prokofiev. It's not a fairy tale really but I grew up in a very musical family (piano teacher mom) so I am quite familiar with the musical piece and always loved it as a kid. Plus I thought it would be interesting to have musical instruments/performance as an inspiration behind the characters.

SO ONWARD, these are the very very early sketches for this thing, mostly getting the bad ideas out and trying to figure out wolves and burly men. I've decided Peter lives in rural Mongolia, probably in the 19th century or before, so the costumes are based on rough early research of that area. These are all pretty quick, I didn't allow myself to spend too long on one drawing.

So there they are, still need to show a bit more personality in many of these, and break up proportions, but I drew a lot more than I have in a while and it was great. Look for these to get more refined as the semester continues. :D

BONUSSS

The werebear I drew for a Twitter art challenge yesterday, yupp.