process work

For a change, I thought I'd put up some process work on the last piece since some people have asked how I work. For me the first step is simultaneously working thumbnails to try to match what's in my head as close as I can, sketches of principal characters or props, and reference gathering. At this stage i'm working pretty small..maybe 500 by 500 or so.

here are some explorations of the staging and lighting. At this point I know what the scene will be, and I pretty much know I want a low vantage point. Now I need to figure out in a sloppy way how it all fits together...here's a sampling of pose work and character exploration sketches



and finally the final lead up to the finished piece. Laying down the perspective grid is a pain, but necessary for something architectural. I'm working at about2000 high by whatever wide, because my final piece is going to be twice that, and there's a huge amount of layers at this stage which would choke my machine to death.

after blocking in all the elements, it's just a matter of polish. Ordiniarily there would be more thorough color studies in here, but with the night lighting i knew what I wanted so I just went with it.

Well, hopefully this is something interesting...

The Portly Thief

who would think to look up for a portly thief?

If there's any interest I can post some of the process stuff on this in the coming days. It was a fun piece to work on and very challenging to put it all together.


I don't know what's in that bag, but it's really really valuable.

Guard

This piece is for an upcoming scene I'm working on where a guard is looking for someone who's just escaped. Interestingly, I originally had a totally different emotion in mind when I started this. Initially I was going with a ' I'm gonna keel you!' feel for the guy, with a sneering, teeth bared look. But as I was working on the face, the personality of the character established itself and ' I keel you' was replaced by ' alright, where did that bastard go?'


and hopefully in the end that's the right call for the piece.

On another note, if I had to pick just one group of guys to teach you everything you needed to know as an artist, I would say to look at the Orientalists. No foolin. With Sargeant, Bouguereau, Waterhouse, and Gerome amongst their ranks, you could sure do worse for mentors.