Macbeth 4

Okay, so here is a more revised painting.  I amped up the contrast and thought maybe it'd be more effective if I blended the middle witch with the background.  I added more definition to the witch with the shear veil over her face and tweaked the shadows on the arms of the two flanking witches. 

Macbeth 3

So here it is!  My final, digitally painted Macbeth poster.  Or my "final" for now anyway.  

 

MACBETH 2

Here's a color study and it's variations, with line, without line, with text, combined with the value study, etc.  I will definitely exclude the line and use a painterly approach.  I'm really enjoying the painting part of digital illustration.  The colors are a complementary color palette of reds and greens with accents of golds.  It seems to fit with the theme of Macbeth.  Green is envy, red is seduction/murder/blood.

Fill colors

Value study and color study combined

Without the line looks best.  It's softer and more sinister.

MACBETH

New assignment!  For our next assignment in my illustration class, we are creating either CD covers, book covers, or movie/play posters!  I'm so excited, and as the title shows, I've decided to create a play poster for my favorite Shakespearean play "Macbeth."  I'm not entirely sure why this play, of all plays, stands out to me the most.  Probably because it's all about how unhealthy ambition can be your downfall.  I'm super ambitious just so you know.  Also, this play as some of the strongest female characters than any of Shakespeare's other plays (unless you count Taming of the Shrew).  Lady Macbeth is evil and awesome!  She is the true villain and manipulator.  Also, the three witches are simply iconic. I love to quote them..."Double, double," "All hail thee Macbeth, thane of Cawdor," etc.  It really surprised me, when watching my favorite Harry Potter movie, the Prisoner of Azkaban, that the  students sang the witches' poem from Macbeth.  Love, love, love!  Anyway, so here are some of my sketches and studies for my poster.  I really love the idea of ambition being seductive and tempting.  In my thumbnails I went back and forth between showing Lady Macbeth tempting and coaxing Macbeth and the witches coaxing him.  I decided on the witches, purely because I wanted to show a trio hovering over Macbeth.  Here are some thumbs.

I then took very specific reference photos using friends who were sweet enough to pose for me.  I came up with this sketch.

I then scanned the sketch in and turned it to line art.  

This is a quick value study.  

Now for the text.  I really do love Garamond, mostly because it's the font used in all of the Harry Potter books.

Color studies and other fonts and placements are on their way!

Faces and Backs

Okay, so I forgot to include my back design for the cards in the previous post.  So here we go:

These are for a COMPLETELY different project for a different class, but this blog isn't strictly for illustration.  I'm trying to double major in illustration and painting, and this is what I'm doing in my painting class currently.  These paintings (and there are more) were influenced by 3D stop-motion films and the production of these films.  These pieces are meant to reflect that sense of unity and teamwork involved in stop-motion.  Also, I've been using pattern as a framework, or net, that provides structure and reinforces that idea of unity.  So yes, always trying new things.  These are done in plaster gauze and acrylic paint.  

Creation. 30"X36"

Feeling Whole Again. 11"X18"

Card Borders and Backs

So it makes life, and art, so much easier and better if you just make your own textures.  Especially if you want a specific look.  Using the paint tool or the burn tool on Photoshop didn't give me the desired effect, so I just burned my own paper.  I suggest not burning paper in an enclosed room like I did, unless you want your smoke alarms to go off.  So the backgrounds are actual burned paper.  The dark lines (the "eyelashes" that frame the ovals and suit signs) were done in pencil, scanned in, and manipulated on Photoshop.  I thought that looked better than using a brush, and it is more consistent I think.  So one problem I noticed, however, is that when printing and cutting, there's the possibility that some of the edges will get cut into.  That's always something to think about when you're designing something meant to be printed and reproduced.  

Revised Travel Poster and Postcard

OKAY!  So here are the revised-revised travel poster and postcard.  Granted, it's not in my usual style (if I even have a style), but it's more of an experiment really.  I played with different textures that I created using graphite rubbings.  I also looked online (I do not suggest using other images unless they are your own, but glass is difficult to photograph.  But don't listen to me).  The poster is mostly influenced by art deco posters, especially Metropolis.  Fred Burton, one of the craziest and most influential teachers at my school, got on me for my lack of movie knowledge.  So he made me watch Metropolis and I LOVED it.  The postcard, however, was influenced by the decorative elements of art nouveau.  I've been on a pattern kick recently, so I decided to sneak that into the postcard.

Travel Poster Color Studies

Okay, so these aren't actually revised sketches.  They're more revised than the thumbnails, but not quite there yet.  These are some examples of color schemes I want to go with.  This first set of five are the designs for my travel poster;  the second set, for my postcard.  For the actual designs, I'm working on a more revised sketch that incorporates more of the bike idea.  Possibly adding a gear facade onto the building or paving the road with gears or wheels.  I definitely need to work on the people, since they're in the foreground.  So with that said, here are some possible color schemes.  For this first set of five, I'm leaning more towards the second, the purples, greens, and golds.

These are the quick color studies of my postcards.  I played off of the Kanye West "blinds" glasses idea (I have no idea what they're called, but they have horizontal bars that remind me of window blinds).  I've also added some examples of the highly patterned and colored plant life of Madda.  I like the first and the third one, mostly because blues and oranges are my favorite colors to use with each other.  The postcards are more art nouveau than art deco, like the poster is.  

10 Card Designs

Okay, so for those who don't know, I was anti-digital the first two years of art school.  I hated it, it took forever, too many shortcuts to remember, and I felt like an elephant learning how to paint.  Then I talked to some fantastic illustrators at Spectrum Fantastic Art Live, wrote an excessive amount of notes when my teachers would give demos, and interviewed and picked the brains of other illustrators and classmates.  This card assignment has provided me with the perfect way to practice, so I've been dedicating about 6 to 12 hours each week working on these.  I have 52 cards to design.  I believe I have the first 10 paintings at a finished state.  I can't afford to dwell on them for too too long.  I'm almost finished with the next 10.  What I really need to focus on right now is designing a border for the front, the suit signs along with the typography (I really love Garamond and Snicket uses it in his books), and the pattern for the backs.  I also need to speed up production; I tend to dwell on detail.  I'm going to change these backdrops below, mostly because the burned edge texture looks bad in my opinion.  I want to actually burn paper and scan it in.  But these are just to give you an idea of where I'm going.  

                             Aunt Josephine                                             Klaus reading

                                 Uncle Monty                                                  Count Olaf

                               The Reptile Room                                        Captain Sham

                  Sunny and the Incredibly Deadly Viper                          Stephano

                                 Violet as bride                                             Sunny in a cage

Art Deco/Metropolis Posters

 

  

 

So you guessed it!  My next assignment in my Illustration 4 class is to create a travel poster for an imaginary world.  I came up with the idea of Madda last semester when I struggled to come up with ideas for my Communication Arts submission (my work wasn't accepted, but I expected that).  Madda is Addam backwards, my dad's name.  Before my dad passed away, he spent most of his time in our garage welding and building these surreal, crazy looking bikes that looked impossible to ride.  My brother and I would ride our normal bikes around the neighborhood collecting discarded bike parts and would bring them to my dad.  He'd then weld them together and spray paint them in crazy colors.  We'd then test drive them and were surprised we could actually ride them!  They were great and a way for him to feel productive and active as his condition worsened.  In my eyes, he became sort of a mad scientist.  So this world is my dad's world, in a way.  I try to incorporate some of my dad's ideas as well as my own in a lot of my work.  So as I wrote down my ideas for this travel poster, I thought of the movie Metropolis and all of the dystopian books I've been reading lately (The Handmaid's Tale, 1984, The Hunger Games, etc.) and movies I've watched (V for Vendetta, Star Wars, etc.).  Although my world is much lighter than those books and movies, I really like the style of them, especially of Metropolis and Art Deco posters.  The images posted are some of the posters that really stood out to me.