Red on the Mesa Process

I'm home sick drinking all the ginger ale in the tri state area so I thought I'd do a little write up on the process of a recent illustration I've finished!

I secretly want to call this 'Red on Top of the World' but I think a Pride & Prejudice film score reference is too esoteric.

I've been wanting to do another piece with Red for a while, a character I first drew a couple of years ago, as seen here in this file photo:

A month or so ago the idea of a really brightly colored desert really started to appeal to me, her story that I've been slowly putting together (to eventually be a comic or some other media) isn't 100% happy but I didn't want to set it in a grimdark kinda place and deserts aren't always just brown, I'm from Utah I'm an expert on deserts.

I knew I wanted her observing the landscape, I think these kinda of compositions are my favorite, the lone traveler and the vastness of the landscape behind them, or maybe I just really should admit I really like painting landscapes (I've always said I was more a character than environment artist, maybe I'm lying to myself, haha). Or maybe I'm just always super inspired by NC Wyeth:

ANYWAY, I did a ton of little pencil sketches during work meetings and on the bus trying to figure this painting out, and I can't find them otherwise I'd post them here, but imagine a hastily drawn rectangle with a bunch of indecipherable shapes in it. I then attempted to draw it out on the computer, thinking I'd figured it all out, which I hadn't and it was hard. So I jumped straight to color & shape because for some reason I'm starting to really like doing that lately, figuring things out in shapes instead of line sometimes really helps with environments for me. This whole scientific process is seen here:

So for choosing colors, it was actually pretty easy. I have this fantastic Photoshop addon called Coolorus. I put in the red of Red's #D71215 poncho (her namesake). I wanted to keep it warm since the desert is hot, etc, and as red is already warm I picked an analogic (essentially means 'the same', think analogy) color scheme. 

The addon has a handy button for schemes above the color wheel, I picked an accent too because maybe some green would look good in there somewhere. For Red herself I chose the colors in the original and oranged them up a bit, I mostly wanted her poncho/head to stand out, didn't care as much about the boots/legs.

Using these colors as a base I just changed the brightness/saturation/hue a bit for the different levels of the painting; foreground would be the the darker, cooler fuschia, midground a light orange, background, a paler, bluer (atmospheric perspective) version of the fuschia and the sky a very pale green.

I struggled with the composition of this one, as composition is not one of my strongest points. I tried to make the lines of the landscape lead to and frame her, as well as abusing the rule of thirds just a little bit.

I also checked my values a lot, with a white layer set to color above everything. I wanted her to be the darkest darks and some of the lightest lights (the clouds had to be white tho, that was in my vision) 

and there ya go!

Here's this again in case you forgot after reading all that.

BONUS:

~under the red poncho~

Thanks for reading!

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.