Here's what I've been working on for the past few days. I figured I would just post my progress stuff (and final) since I have not posted much in the last few days. The drawing above is a cleaner version of a rough sketch I did earlier in which Im positioning things and working the comp out.
This is a value study of the comp. I repositioned the sword and reworked a few other little things.
Here's my final paint thus far. I cropped in more to focus on the pirates face and added all the fun stormy elements, and dutched the camera a tad. I kept him fairly iconic looking and that was kinda the point of this project ( iconic characters of lore), anyway ,overall I'm pretty happy with it. Any of you pro illustrators feel free to critique and tear it up :)
Great to see the progress.
ReplyDeleteOf all your sketches I can see why you went in this direction. Lots of movement, nice asymmetrical composition, great fore, middle and background.
Couple things to have a look at:
The cropping of your third jpeg does focus the viewer in on the pirate, but you lose some of the understandability of the drawing. The helm of the ship becomes unreadable and transforms into an architectural rather than narrative element.
By cropping his right hand we lose the "hanging on for dear life" quality of the original sketch.
Something similar (but not as dramatic) happens to the hand holding the sword.
In both cases I would consider shifting the composition (slightly) to allow that storytelling to remain.
Other observations:
The light from the left has a clean morning glow which gives this piece an optimistic feeling (this is not a judgment call just how I react to the piece)
I also really like the chunky, hard edged quality of your original pencil sketch. That got a bit lost in the painting process. The mark making in the sketch tended to tell me something about this character which I liked.
I concur with David, and my additional comment is a very small one - I like that you figured out the wheel, but by laying it in like a mechanical drawing, it lost dynamism. A hint of perspective or of your line would go along ways.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I recommend Howard Pyle's Flying Dutchman painting. :)
Thanks tons guys for the feed back! I'm going to rework the painting to hit the great points you guys made. I agree about the cropping. I don't want to loose the narrative of my original concept of him hanging on for dear life. I also checked out the flying Dutchman painting, pretty awesome. Thanks again!
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