FMP Week 3

Following on from last week, this week I carried on with the final concept of the blind character. The first thing I did for this concept is get some ref. I wanted to have the character crushing an eye ball, but turns out that's actually hard to find. So I went to Tesco and bought some tomatoes (they were the right size for what I wanted, and I didn't really want to crush actual eyeballs. With some help from my friend I gathered ref of me crushing said tomatoes.

This was the best picture we got, and I think it makes pretty decent ref, it looks gross enough as it is, and it's not too different from what I actually want for it to be hard to paint from. So with that ref sorted I decided to continue working on the concept.

I worked on the hand first, since I had the ref, and I think it worked out pretty well. The colours overall are far too muted though and the eyes were far too obvious for my liking. So I reworked it completely.

I did just a sketch first and came up with the idea of having a guide dog, but I still wanted to keep the crushed eye because I really liked the look of it. From this sketch I worked into it a lot more, try to merge it with my other concept iteration. I also wanted to work a lot more on the colour, making them a lot less muted.

This is the final concept for the character. As you can see I fixed the colour issues I had previously mentioned. I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out. It's definitely got that element of creepiness that I wanted, it's a lot less stylised than my previous character which I'm happy about I think it looks a lot better because of it. Following on from the concept I started working on the illustration.

When starting the illustration I wasn't really sure what I wanted the layout to look like, so I started with a few different ideas.

Out of these two I definitely preferred the first one, so that's the one I continued to work on that one.

I like the rendering of the character so far, I'm still unsure of the overall layout of the picture and I'm still sort of thinking about what sizes I want the book to be, and that'll really effect the illustrations.

For now this is how I'm going to leave this illustration, until I know for sure what dimensions I want them to be. I'm thinking of having them all portrait since it'll fit well in a portrait or landscape book. I quite like this illustration so far, it's definitely gross and dark which is the goal (which still feels strange to say...) Next week, I'm going to work on a brand new phobia!