I’ve been meaning to post this bangin’ babe up for a while now – just haven’t had the chance to get round to it till now.
What a hectic week!
But there’s lots going on, and I’m having a total blast along the way. In fact the biggest highlight by far has been making the transition from teaching this stuff in a classroom environment, to one-on-one private coaching.
The progress made in just one session has been phenomenal so I’m super excited to see where this goes.
Anyway – to the drawing at hand -
You might have already seen the half done version of this illustration - which was basically just the girl minus the background. And to be honest, I had to make a few attempts to get it looking right.
What I was after was a backdrop that grounded the character in her environment, but also framed her in a way that brought all the attention to her.
I figured the best way of doing that was to drop in some set props around the foreground and middle ground, but to leave the far back fairly spars in terms of detail. That initially resulted in a crosshatched gradient that took forever to do – but just did not look right.
So I bit the bullet, got rid of the entire thing, which thankfully wasn’t too big of a work around since all the background components were separated onto different layers.
Then I took a break, and had a browse through my reference library at some of the art work the pros managed to pull off while capturing a similar effect.
And I think that by merely looking through some of my old favorites – Marc Silvestri, Jim Lee, David Finch – I ended up coming up with the bright idea to throw in some action lines around her to make the final frame to this sequence that much more energetic.
But they weren’t just your average array of action lines…
I decided to throw in some thick black areas specifically around her head, while spotlighting the gun with a high contrast frame of white. This sped up the pace of the panel and gave the context more impact – while still achieving what I’d initially set out to do.
Then it was just a matter of laying in those final details around the middle ground and foreground.
I’ll make another post later today with all three sequences just in case you haven’t already seen the previous ones, but all in all I’m pretty happy with how they turned out in the end.
So happy in fact that it’s got me thinking about all types of potential Web-Comic ideas… but as they say – one passion project at a time.
For now, it’s onto the next Slide where I’ll be drawing up a rather literal example of how our brain frantically tries to juggle all those fundamental principles we have to remember when we set out to draw something. Not the easiest act to pull off I’m sure you’ll agree!
But that’s what the next Figure Drawing Foundations Course is all about – simplifying the creation process, step-by-step, to make it a whole lot easier to execute.
So stay tuned – I’ll have more previews coming your way soon. Keep on creating, and enjoy!
-Clayton