Sunday, June 21, 2009

Friday, June 12, 2009

OZ : The TinMan pt.2 (progress)





A few screen shots of the TinMan revamp in the making. He is finished and has already been sent to the printers, but I will wait until they officially release him before I post the final.

Monday, June 8, 2009

OZ : The TinMan pt.1


I recently had a class at school called "Illustration Specialization." That was basically a fancy way of saying, "draw what you want, as long as it focuses on the genre or type of work you would like to do professionally."

So I had always thought it would have been neat to do my own interpretation of the characters from The Wizard of Oz. The Tinman, The Lion, Scarecrow, and of course Dorothy. I also wanted to try something I had never attempted before. I wanted the paintings to "flow into each other" so when I was finished with the project, they could all be assembled together as one BIG long illustration. My mind set was to take on the project as if they were a series of book covers or maybe as character concepts for a game.

So I got to work with the thumbnails (which I did as one overall thumbnail) refining as I went along. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted for the Tin Man, so I started with him first.



Now I must tell you, right before I had started this project, I was introduced to the works of Justin Gerard and his amazingly unique process of which I had tried to mimic ... (and I failed)

(You should Check out his super awesome Hobbit projects he recently finished up.)

The process was to get the tonal value via thumbnail, which I did in Photoshop. then from that, print and pencil out the tighter pencil work. From there, using a very limited palette of watercolor to get all my textures and values (light vs. dark areas) Once I got my values in, I would scan in the painting and finish it off in Photoshop.

But... Like I said, I failed to execute this process as smoothly as Mr.Gerard. So here is a look at what happened the first time around...




Below is was what I turned in for the grade. I was very unhappy with it, and I knew i could do better.


The part 2 of this post, I will show the new and improved Tinman and a few progress shots of how I got there.

Thanks for viewing and being that this my first "real" post on my new blog, I would love to get feedback from anybody who took the time to get this far. Good or Bad. :)