Category: 3. Image development

Well this took me much much longer than I expected to. I decided on this image as inspiration for my own drawing:

And the word I chose to go with it is “Adventure”.

I did a digital drawing. One fault straight away is that I probably stayed too close to the source material. In the future I’ll try to be more willing to deviate from reference images.

Here is my process:

I spent a lot of time with the colours.

The final step was to include my chosen word in the finished drawing. Earlier I was doing some sketchbook work, brainstorming different ideas.

I didn’t have any font installed that matched my ideas. I ended up getting a key image and blowing up the individual letters as stencils and drawing on the script myself.

Here’s the final result.

I’m pretty happy with this as a poster design. I think the font matches the illustration.

I did a bit of brainstorming to come up with a good image to use for this exercise. I came up with a wide range of potential artworks, sort of broadly dividing them between concept art and fine art. I spent some time thinking about which image is right for the job, choosing some works for having a lot of content, some for having complex compositions, and so on. In the end I figured that the exercise was not so much about choosing the perfect image but more the methodology of image development.

In order: Ralph McQuarrie, Hiroshige, Katsuhiro Otomo, Édouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, Eugène Delacroix, Hokusai, Kim Jung Gi, Ayami Kojima.

I decided on this piece of promotional artwork by Akihiko Yoshida. It has a large amount of characters and lots of places to zoom in and out from while retaining the core information of the image. I also just really love this artwork, and it reminded me of the hot/cold theme from the last exercise. It strikes me as something unique and personal.

I stopped off at a copy shop and got the image printed ten times, then got to work arriving at ten different compositions.

I’ve labelled the images with words that relate to the content.

Heroes

Stoic

Deception

Swashbuckling

Calm

Ready

Adventure

Battle

Fantasy

Brotherhood

Doing this exercise I was particularly impressed with Yoshida’s skills of composition. There were so many ways to combing the different figures and they all interlapped in interesting ways. The way the main protagonists form a star formation; the two betrayers appear very sinister when separated from the others; the sense of movement, comraderie and group dynamics are all very impressive.

I feel like in the uncropped image, the focal characters are the two in the foreground. It’s very easy to move the focus around and create unique combinations of characters with different focal points.

I think the way the image was constructed, it’s hard to alter the overall sense of drama in the different arrangements. Almost everything is unified in portraying a certain theme. A few of the characters do seem more reserved or out of place. The girl in the flowing white robes, who is a sort of healer, is not brandishing a weapon and seems different compared to the other characters.

Next I’m going to work on a drawing inspired by one of the cropped images.