Sketches and Ideas

 I did this first sketch for the weekly sketch challenges. The theme was something inorganic. The reference was a movie still from the movie "Avatar". I wanted my inorganic object to be a modern, "concept art" like object. My first idea was to do some transformers, but as I don't have that movie, I decided to go with the movie Avatar, for convenience. I did this sketch in pen, having been inspired by a fellow classmate, and the artist Feng Zhu. At first I was intimidated by pen, because of the permanency of it. One wrong mark would ruin the picture, right? But after I saw my classmate's picture, I realized that you simply drew over the mistake, and it really didn't show. So I tried this sketch and found, to my amazement, that it was turing out well! I liked how much darker the values could get, and how bold the overall picture became. However, I didn't take into consideration the perspective of the drawing.

 These sketches were for the new assignment we got this week. For this assignment, we are supposed to illustrate the word Resilience. I would imagine the "client" wants it done for some sort of card game, or motivational poster. So, I sketched out a few ideas.
             To give a little background info, the last illustration I did came out pretty bad, in my opinion. The composition was great, but I felt that the rendering was not up to scratch. This time, I am going for a simpler composition and subject matter, so that I can have more time to render the subject well, and have less smaller subjects to render. I'm pretty sure this will help my piece. I'm aiming to make my illustration look professional, and when I say professional, I'm thinking something like Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, or Frank Frazetta. This might be aiming a little high, but we'll see how it goes!

 

And so, we come to where I am right now. I chose this idea, since it had interesting subject matter, and had a simple design, with one, large figure to render. It also had some interesting design elements to it, with the arrows sticking out of the figure's body. The basic idea behind this painting is that this warrior shows resilience through his actions. He has taken a lot of punishment, but is still fighting. My inspirations were warriors like Boromir from LOTR, who took 3 arrows, and was still fighting,  and the samurai from The Last Samurai, some of whom took 7 or 8 bullets, and were still fighting strong. That was the basic idea. So, I made this warrior leaning on a door jam or pillar (haven't decided yet), clutching his sword, which he is barely holding up. I want to put a look of grim determination on his face, and the background will be a battleground with ruined buildings, and perhaps an atomic explosion in the background, make it all scary-like and apocalyptic.