Yeah so I was lazy and missed week one.  That’s why you see thumbnails over there on the left in week 2. 

I felt it was time to introduce a villain.  With our word this month being South I thought an officer from the Confederate Army was fitting.  But the thumbnails just weren’t flowing well.  They all felt static.  I was having trouble finding something to get excited about.  So, I decided to get a fresh start in Photoshop and begin again the way I would if it was something that had to be done in a hurry.  Black and white, pushing shapes around until something starts to feel right.  The image below on the left is the first thing to have that “right” feeling so I started to refine from there.  I liked how the brim of his hat hid his face, making him more mysterious but with the front of his uniform so obscured by his right arm I felt it would be smarter to switch to a more recognizably civil war era hat.

There’s my final above.  You can get a larger view if you click on the image.  I know you could scroll through the blog and see the whole process… but I thought it’d be nice to collect it into one gif.

Not a whole lot to report this week.  I started with the 3D render from last week, switched it to grayscale and started painting right over the top in Photoshop.  Some people like to paint completely in grayscale and then add all the color right at the end with an assortment of layer styles.  I prefer to get the color started a lot sooner.

Something I’ve been wrestling with on this picture is what all these giant shapes should be made of.  Initially it was all over the board but I think I’ve settled on silver, bronze, glass, and stone.  By grounding the image with a few recognizable materials I’m hoping to create a greater sense of realism and age.

Today’s post is a little anemic but I’m going to cheat by updating it over the next day or two to flesh it out.

I want to give myself as much information as I can before diving into painting. Since I don’t have a metallic clock-faced owl on hand I made a little maquette. It isn’t the most refined thing around, but it has the basic shapes I want.

I spray painted the owl gold to get the metallic look I wanted, set up a simple lighting rig and took a batch of shots. I think it will help a lot.

REFERENCE

This week was all about gathering reference. I thought I’d share some.

This painting, “The Man with the Golden Helmet” has to be listed as my first bit of reference. It was very much on my mind as I thought of the story and (perhaps strangely) influenced the creation of the Clock-Owl idea. When I paint the portrait of the adult version of our protagonist I’ll be trying to get as close to this feeling as my limited skills allow.

The spread below is a collection of assorted reference. A friend and her daughter kindly agreed to pose for the figures. On the far right is a quick chop together of their pictures to give me something to look at as I start my drawings.

This first image is what most of my ideas look like when they first get going; not much. It’s just something down on paper so I don’t forget it later. Here’s how this line of thought went: “Future.” Clock. Clock face. Barn owls have round flat faces. Clock-faced owl. Owls feel wise. More of an ancient wisdom tied into nature. This owl is time.

I knew I wanted to create a narrative I could pull through the whole Artist Deck set. The guide/mentor is a classic character archetype and to have your guide be Time itself… could be cool. Let’s start with a young character’s discovery of the owl-clock, frozen as if it has simply been used as a timepiece for the last 100 years. To reinforce the word Future a much older version of our protagonist will hang above to scene, almost entirely in shadow, as if looking back on a memory.

These last two images are me trying to figure out what an owl-clock looks like and a small charcoal thumbnail starting to figure out composition. I don’t like using pencils for thumbnails because it’s sooo easy to get into too much detail. The downfall is that they don’t make sense to anyone but me. It’s not like I can show that thumbnail to someone and say, “see what I mean?”