Redo 2

The second stage in my digital process is coloring the linework.  One of my favorite parts of the original watercolor was how bright and skittles-hued the stir-fly wave was.  That needed to be duplicated here.  Not everything is getting colored lines, though.  It helps establish range of tone if there's some nice pure black and pure white to draw the eye in.

Redo

I'm redoing a few of my portfolio pieces, and for archival purposes, I'll be documenting the process here.

You may remember this as "April" in my Christmas calendar.  It still is, but this time I'm using a Windsor Newton Series 7 Kolinksy Sable size #4 brush, and it almost works like a dream.  I imagine I'll wear it in pretty fast.  I am impressed.

A New Blog Post

One might think that title is a bit redundant.  Not at all.  My work for Experience Life Magazine has been featured on Design Director Stepahnie Glaros's blog, seen HERE.  You can also link to it from my facebook page....HERE.

Are You Funemployed?

I'm currently working on material for a webisode series by a bunch of fellow SCAD-grads called Funemployed. It's quite a zesty enterprise, and involves such erudite and saucy topics as beard-growing, chugging contests, self-defense, and internships. From the top, that's Jay (Michael Lippert), Lockwood (Alex Harris), Ted (Ted Evans), Amy (Kate Carson-Groner), and Bill (Dan Hale).

Above are the main characters, and more finished design and process work will come soon, because I've been woefully neglecting this blog since December, and you person deserve something big.

Three Mile Angel

Okay. Here's the process. This first sketch, which I did in my shiny new sketchbook while eating a pizza pretzel at 10 at night in a Barnes and Noble.


I thought it was an interesting idea, so I pursued it along the avenue of, what would make an angel's head explode? Maybe their heads explode when they're mad?

Okay, not that interesting. So what? I decided Fred was not a good name for an angel, and started researching angels and saints, and other celestial beings whose might conceivably explode. It turns out that Christians aren't that keen on names Saints and angels after things like destruction and anger and nuclear holocaust. I'd have to make my own.

Right? So now I have a bottom-up angel of...Wrath? Heavy Metal? Elmer Fudd? Saint Angus, Patron of Rawk? Clearly, this whole things about the angel being mad is not working. Wouldn't it be compelling if this explosive angel of destruction (I never really left the idea) was still calm and angelic while he spread mass chaos and radioactive devastation? Let's try that. The key is to create a scene that leaves the angel as the focal point, while creating a viable and interesting setting to place it in.

It's hard, so I went the minimalist approach.


Simple, yeah?

Let's see what might be the final.



I'm still not entirely happy with it. One person commented that putting the angel off-center would make for a more interesting composition, and I agree. But I still like the simplicity of this. Any other element would potentially take away from the impact.

So I'm not going to change anything until I know for sure it will improve the piece.

Let me know, yah?

Process

I thought I'd document the process I go through to make a finished work of raw genius. For some reason, I can't find my original thumbnails, so here is the next step, my preliminary sketch.


Directly below is the final pencil sketch I used, to get the placement exactly right. I transfer this onto bristol board using a lightbox, then ink it.

Here is the final inked artwork, using a Princeton (cheep!) 5 brush. Notice I left out a few of the letters. That's because these letters appear more than once in the phrase. I can copy them in Photoshop to achieve a more uniform typeface.

This is the finished bit of art. Though I could achieve a similar clean shape in Illustrato, I prefer Photoshop out of habit.

I'll probably continue to tweak this a few more times to make it even more betterer.
Stay posted.