For this exercise the task was to create an image of a fantastical or futuristic world on a large scale (A3 or larger) based around four prompts:
Barbarian World
Science City
Lost Civilisation
Alien Encounter
I started with mind maps in my notebook to think of possible ideas.
Out of all the options, I enjoyed the one inspired by a comment from my wife - to take the idea of a lost civilisation and come at it from a different angle of making a civilisation based on lost things. To explore the lost civilisation idea more, I then used my sketchbook to create some thumbnails.
I ended up enjoying the thumbnail with the character the most - all of the others seemed to be more like concept art. So I used my scan, and placed the thumbnail into Affinity Photo, expanding it to A3 size. My thumbnail ratio was not the same as an A3 sheet, so my next step was to tweak the composition.
I moved things around by using the lasso tool, and took the opportunity to fill in other parts of the image, getting a sense of perspective and depth. Once I was happy that the overall composition was one I liked, I then moved to doing some rough pencil work.
I started to add in more details, reworking things and I changed the wooden spoon on the main character to a single lost sock. As I added more and more details, the act fed into my imagination, and ideas kept popping into my mind about what one might find in my fantastical world. I thought it best to resolve issues and add more details by moving to a new refined pencils layer.
I was having a lot of fun by this point, I really leaned into the advice that Brett Parson had given me to have fun, draw on my influences and ‘get weird’. I loved thinking of, and inseting, little Easter eggs here and there of things I loved, especially from my childhood. When I had gotten to the stage above, I felt ready to add in the inks proper.
Doing the inks allowed me to pay more attention to things like line weight, details and fixing weird perspective mistakes. One of the things that didn’t seem to sit well was the sock in the focal area, but I decided to persevere anyway. In retrospect, I think that I should have worked out how to put more negative space around the sock. My favourite additions ended up being my Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references of the whale and bowl of petunias. Next I wanted to add in colour, I thought that I could use colour to differentiate the values and create more contrast to help the sock issue. I decided not to go with the normal conventional colouring process, but tried to approach it like a watercolour painting, working from layered washes and adding in darker colours. This didn’t work out the way I thought it would, and I ended up painting in colours as I went. Whilst you might think that this would be quicker, not having flats as a reference for selections would have actually sped things up a lot. Also, the amount of detail in the piece made the whole thing quite time consuming.
Next, I created non-destructive adjustment levels layers to add in shadows, ambient occlusion, highlights and atmospheric perspective. I also learned from using colour holds in my last exercise to knock-back the background inks, allowing the foreground elements to stand out more from all the details.
Given my initial watercolour approach, I then wondered what it would be like to make it look like it had been done traditionally on watercolour paper.
I really enjoyed this task, it felt very ‘me’ and I especially liked letting go and putting in lots of weird, zany and geeky elements.
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