the Dragon of the Valley

This past semester I had a class on children's book illustration, and with each project I sort of cobbled together a loose narrative I ended up calling "the Dragon of the Valley". I sort of want to actually make it into a proper book, and one day I hope I can.

While it's in order here, these were done a bit out of order, the two double-page spreads were one project, then the vignettes, and then the final project of the year was the cover and inside title.

An entire semester and the warrior and the dragon never even got to start their fight.

School Arts

A project for school, we were told to pick a review of a recent movie or album and create an editorial to go along with it, I chose a review of Drive from the New Yorker.

 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2011/09/26/110926crci_cinema_lane?currentPage=all

A school project: We were given an article about the ten stereotypical types of therapist and told to illustrate three. I chose the Pill-Pusher, who just proscribes pills to solve any problem, the Comedian, who uses all the information he gets in his sessions to bolster his comedy act, and the Dream Dissector, who thinks the root of all issues lies in over-analyzing dreams. 

A project for school: We were given the 48 Laws of Power and randomly selected two to draw. I got 3 and 21, 3 turned out terribly, this is 21.

 Law 21

Play a Sucker to Catch a Sucker – Seem Dumber than your Mark

No one likes feeling stupider than the next persons.  The trick, is to make your victims feel smart – and not just smart, but smarter than you are.  Once convinced of this, they will never suspect that you may have ulterior motives.

Laws of Power: http://www2.tech.purdue.edu/cg/courses/cgt411/covey/48_laws_of_power.htm

School Arts

So I'm handing in some projects this week and I'm happy enough with them that I want to put them up on my blog.

This first one is for my core illustration class, we were told to write up a list of "guilty pleasures" and then to select one and create an illustration out of it. Needless to say many of my guilty pleasures should not be seen in the light of day so I went with "smelling books", which actually got me quite a few stares in class. Go figure

The second is for book illustration. We were told to illustrate an event either from the media or from our personal lives. I chose to draw up that one time I was on the register for 6-and-a-half straight hours with no break and no end to the line of customers.

There was a caption to go with this one but I left it out. Might re-add it later.

Dungeons and Malareth

I and some chums are trying to get into Dungeons and Dragons. We've only just finished the Red Box (starter set) and already I'm finding it amazingly fun to be the Dungeon Master. 

Anyway the Big Bad of the adventure that comes with the box is this necromancer guy, Malareth. The wizard of the party mixed some chemicals by way of levitation on Malareth's workbench, they exploded and the necromancer turned into two face. Oh yeah.

Game of Thrones

Over the summer I finally jumped on the Game of Thrones bandwagon, I enjoyed it so much that I bought the book the other week. Both are absolutely amazing. To a nerd I would say it's the politics of Dune mixed with the adventure of Lord of the Rings and to a not-nerd I would say it's like the Tudors, but better and also snow zombies.

Anyway school started and one of the classes I'm taking is Book Illustration, I was sitting in the first class when I doodled the images bellow: 

Eddard Stark, Warden of the North is my favourite character with the most awesome of titles. I feel really sorry for him throughout both the show and the book, watching him struggle to keep doing the right thing is heartbreaking at times. The fact that he is also Boromir helps.

I feel like there is a jingle in here somewhere. 

Oh god I hope whoever is looking at these has already watched or read Game of Thrones...

This is only somewhat of a spoiler.

And now, for your viewing pleasure:

The last two are by no means my favourite part, just the images I felt worked really well in that kids booky style.

Tales from Sfera

some process

The comics in the previous post were made over a week ago, however I wanted to wait to post them so I could put up all of the Dragon Age II stuff together. This took longer than I thought though because the piece here took so very much work. I was working not only entirely on the computer, something I am not used to and which makes me more prone to want everything to look perfect, but I was also working in a colouring style I had never before tried.
I will now outline my frustrating, but ultimately successful journey of trying to draw a nice picture of my Dragon Age II party:

Alright so to start off I do a very quick sketch just to get the composition, the positions and poses of the characters. I was trying to get a kind of "V" composition going on with Hawkes Greatsword and Avelines sword and shield.

After the sketch I draw the lineart, and then redraw the lineart, and then redraw it again until I reach a point where I'm satisfied with it. I've added in Merrill's staff as well as made Varric a bit shorter (he is a dwarf after all). 

Now that the lines are done I do the shading in a nice, warm tone, adding detail and depth with the burn tool.

This is where I waded into unfamiliar territory: Going section by section I lay down ares of flat colour, then, like the shading layer, I go over it with the burn and dodge tool to add depth and highlights. It was at this point that I realized the afternoon I spent on the shading was made completely redundant.

Anyway I deleted the shading and carried forwards with the burn/dodge tool, then I made Merrill a bit smaller in the background, added in some minor details to Bianca, Hawkes sword and Merrills chain mail, then made the whole thing a bit taller, slapped on a background and, in the immortal words of Neil Buchanan, when you're done, you should get something that looks like this:

Reasonably happy with how it turned out.