Next Illustration down! My final for Watercolor class this past Spring has been fixed up and is good to go. I illustrated a scene from Phantom, by Terry Goodkind.
First I illustrated the scene after some thumbnails and color roughs. Once the composition was chosen, I had my wonderful boyfriend pose for me, scoured the internet for references, visited the Redwoods here in Oakland to get in the forest mindset (and to take good reference photos), then drew the basic illustration to size, working on getting proportion, scale, etc all right.
I was told about this sweet technique for watercolor in which you use a H pencil (MUST be Hard, and Bs will just smear) to draw and shade however much you'd like, then lay the watercolor over the pencil for a nice texture to show through. Definitely will be doing more of this.
Then a wash of blue for the underlayer....
and a whole bunch more until the finished product (probably should have taken more process shots, but it was the frenzy of finals afterall...)
"In the moonlight, Richard immediately noticed that there was something wrong with the trees. It looked as if they were all dead. The fat, squat trunks were twisted and gnarled. The bark had started to come away in ragged strips. The bent and distorted branches looked like claws reaching out to snatch anyone who dared enter the place" (oh, and
there's a lot of skulls and corpses everywhere, too).
~ Phantom, The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind
