Friday, October 30, 2009

Illustration Friday: "Skinny"

Well, I missed last week's IF topic, so when I saw the new topic today I hit the ground running and hammered it out. Sometimes I like to document my working process. It allows me to think things through and sometimes find ways of doing things more efficiently. So that is what I decided to do today.
First step to starting a project should always set aside a block of time to work on it (which I don't always do), in this case I planned on finishing the project in one sitting, though it took a couple hours longer than I expected.

















Next step is to make a roughs of my ideas. Typically I do several roughs, but in this case I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do.










Another rough was done to work on the position of the central figure. I drew myself posing in the mirror.










With only two roughs done I started an underdrawing on an 18x20 bristle board.













After probably working way too long on the underdrawing, I added little bits of ink rendering just to indicate the form of the figures. I erased the pencil lines after the ink dried. If I stopped at this stage I think it would have made for an interesting picture, but not many people appreciate minimalistic illustration, and I wanted to use color anyway.
















In the next step I blocked in brown tones that I mixed from primary colors. Then I added some blue into the sky.



















I continued to add color. Some artists prefer to work out a color scheme based on the color wheel. Though I sometimes do this too, many times I prefer to think of color as a way of creating form an value, which is what my approach was with this project.


















After laying down the basic colors of my design I wanted to strengthen the values a little bit and so I added washes of India ink.


















Originally, I planned to use collage in this piece, however, as the process went on, I decided that the picture was not lending itself to collage, at least not in the way I was thinking. So instead I used white color pencil to add some lighter values and develop form. I also added some red color pencil.


















With the final step, I finished off the picture with pen and ink, being careful to not overwork the illustration, which is often difficult to do. The "Skinny" part of this illustration is reminiscent of when I used to be a long distance runner. I was so skinny yet I ate vast amounts of food. Today I am much more sedentary, I eat less, and I weigh much more than I did back in the day. Maybe I'll work on the weight after I become a multi-millionaire artist :) I could only be so hopeful!


4 comments:

Alex said...

Great WIP ^^

Ramona Davidson said...

Thank you for showing us the process. It is interesting how each artist produces a piece of art. I like the feel and look of the piece you did. Good art.

David R. Vallejo said...

Thanks Alex and Ramona

I enjoy seeing how other artist approach their art work too. I always feel like I learn something new, if not about the artistic process then definitely about the uniqueness of creativity to the individual.

INDIGENE said...

This was a wonderful WIP, I thought I was the only one who started off with words, then progressed to thumbnails! Thank you for sharing this...the finished piece is great!