Wednesday 16 November 2011

Thumbnails and Experimenting with... Stuff for The Shunned House

"Stuff"? Yep, stuff. Not too sure how I can categorise a lot of this, as its all a bit muddled up bits from testing colours, to methods of illustrating, to composition. I'll explain as I go along.


Fig One- This was a quick experiment with one of the colour palettes I put together. I didn't dwell on detail, simply how colours would react with one another. I quite like the obscure partnership of colours and I'll probably carry these through to my final image.

Fig Two- In this thumbnail I played around with using symmetry to construct the building more accurately. I love how this turned out, both structurally and tonally, but unless the building is head on, this method doesn't really work so well.

Fig Three- In this thumbnail, I attempted to block out shapes with blobs of value instead of using line. I've tried this technique countless amounts of times, but I find it incredibly difficult to visualise my scene this way. I will incorporate this technique in some way (to suggest a distant landscape, for example) but I'll be using line to fabricate my final image, simply because I feel I have more control that way.

Fig Four- This was a very quick thumbnail just establishing potential foreground elements and general composition. This idea was carried over to the next image.

Fig Five- This is probably going to be my final painting for The Shunned House as it is the first idea I've had that I genuinely believe could translate into a pretty impressive image. The warped structure works well with the content of the story, as well as reflecting my own, slightly askew drawing style. There are some elements that I will reconsider adding in the final image (such as the gravestones, the high hill area behind the house etc), but in terms of style and composition, I am very happy with this idea.


I've got to find the rest of my thumbnails for The Masque of the Red Death and The Shunned House, which I shall hopefully upload tomorrow, along with the progress of my Maya work. 

1 comment:

  1. Okay - Fig 5 is the strongest (I still think you're over-thinking the 'blobs of value' approach and making it unnecessarily combative...) however, I'm pretty sure you don't need the gravestone (unless one is mentioned in the story and I've forgotten it - which is possible, but even so it's a bit too Scooby-Do), and you need to think more carefully about the house - fine, go stylised by all means, but the house needs finessing in terms of its 'housiness' - it needs to be more recognisably a house (a chimney wouldn't go a miss etc). In terms of time of day? Any ideas - a bloody sunset, with cool 'witch light' uplighting the facade might look pretty cool? Thoughts?

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