I was at the local archery shop the other day and the owner asked me what I do for a living to which I replied I'm a children's book illustrator. My friend happened to mention my recent blog post about the BBQ company logo I'm working on. I then explained that I may be getting a bit of BBQ product from that client and said we should hold another cookout and say that we shot the pigs ourselves with our bows. Of course the shop owner just happened to have a pig skull on the wall from a pig he had shot,LOL. He was a bit confused when I started showing interest in the skull as a reference for one of my current projects. HE asked, "wait, didn't you say you were a children's book illustrator?"
The funny thing is that the pig skull actually would have been a great reference for one of my current books as I needed to design a crazy, scary looking dog. As I've done almost no work of this sort, I don't have a reference library for random animal skulls, animal muscle anatomy to exaggerate the ferociousness of the creature etc. Luckily I did have some great art website resources available to me that helped a ton. The birds in the sample above still need a lot of work but the dog has already undergone quit a transformation and still has a bit left to go.
2 comments:
I liked the light shine on the first draft you blogged about. I felt like the overall picture looked more exciting with it that way. This one just looks scary, without the excitement factor...in my humble opinion.
Thanks Daisy, Excellent point! I agree completely. For me the image is very much about showing the light in contrast to the forces of darkness around her. We want to be scared with her, but also need to see there is hope for her as the light visibly disturbs the creatures. I still have to work a lot of that into the image. Oh, so much work left to do on this and so little time, LOL. We actually never intended to take out the shine. I just won't be drawing it in this more finalized version as when it comes time to paint it I will nee dot freehand where stuff goes as the pencil line could show through the transparent oilpaints. Depends on how opaque I decide to go. I also don't know for sure how I want to show the glowing and shining effect on the shuttle yet. I will figure that out in the color sample stage which comes tomorrow. I have a few different techniques that could work for that. If I can get the final to look anything liek what it looks like in my head, it shoudl be one of my new favorite pieces.
Post a Comment