Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Bath Time

Last week the Colour Collective prompt was 'Serenity' - a pretty blue with quite a low saturation. It made me think of dusk over a river. That theme made it through to my final illustration, but it went through quite a few changes.

Originally I was planning on doing another Bible Story illustration for my portfolio, and was going to go with a small diptych of Moses being hidden in the rushes and the daughter of the Pharaoh discovering him there. Only then I realised that this was the Nile River, crawling with crocodiles that are most active at dusk. Not, perhaps, the best time and place to take a bath. Midday would be more appropriate, but wouldn't fit the Colour Collective colour of the week. Tine for a rethink.

I then happened to see a picture of someone with a waterjug on her head, and thought maybe I would move to India and have some kids going home from a fishing expedition. Crocodiles are still a problem, but it didn't seem to be so important when they were going home anyway. This concept made it almost through the sketch stage:


It was going to have a dog in as well, but I had decided that the whole picture was too boring before I'd got to that point. I quite liked the idea of India, however, so I switched to some characters I've done for Colour Collective before. Mainly because baby elephants are super fun to draw. ^^ It was good practice for water and wet fabric, too.


When I've redone my original illustration of this little bunch (which doesn't match stylistically), and finished off the second, this will be a three-part story - first they paint their elephant, then they go off for a parade, and then they wash the paint off at night. I imagine there is a lot of squealing going on here, and so the 'serenity' is effectually shattered. 

To date this is my most 'liked' Colour Collective. So far I'm up at the dizzy heights of 46! This week I'm going to have to do something small, I think. It's a fabulous colour but I do not have an equally fabulous amount of time.

Here's a progress animation from sketch to final:


Adobe Photoshop CC2015 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2. I used Kyle Webster's brushes and it took me about 10 to 13 hours.

No comments:

Post a Comment

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...