Evolution of a Drawing

Sometimes I forget to talk about what this blog was meant for. As my crude subtitle would suggest this is meant to chronicle my journey from being the slacker of an artist and person I used to be to becoming... something more. It's a journey that is still in the making, and it involves long days with a pencil or a stylus but is more rewarding than any other thing I've set myself to in the past. Soon I am wrapping up a phase of my life that has lasted a long time, preparing to graduate from the Maine College of Art. Wrapping up with my thesis work has kept me from posting as much as I otherwise might like to and I still have a bit to do, but I thought it might be cool to share the evolution of my most recent piece from thumbnail to final.

So here it is, feel free to skip the words and just look at the pictures:

The first is one of about 10 to 12 thumbnail sketches I did, it wasn't my favorite but my independent study mentor saw promise in it so I went on to develop it.

 

 I had to turn out a full illustration from this point in two weeks, which is a tight deadline for me. Perfect in that I need to speed up my process though. So I went straight to the computer and started to change around the composition in order to get something more dynamic.

  

 I decided the direction was promising but I wasn't convinced about the perspective or my giant's (whom you may recognize from previous posts) intention to harm these little barbarian spearmen. So after a bunch more sketching frustration I ended up with this sketch.

 So this is where I am at now, with a fur coat type thing added in I believe I hit the mark a lot closer to what I was trying to achieve than I would've not all that long ago, and in a shorter time frame. My next lesson though? It's time to learn to render in Photoshop from life, something I haven't given myself a great chance to do and something that ought to make the below image achieve something far greater than it is now, so that I can spend more time worrying about what's being said than trying to get metal to read as metal.