FMP Week 10

This week I worked on Leukophobia, the fear of the colour white. For this one I did a bit of research, since it wasn't so much of an obvious phobia. I found that the most common links with the phobia are weddings and snow, so those were what I decided to base the character on. I knew that the snow aspect would probably come later in the illustration, so I decided to base the character more on the wedding idea.

For these iterations I didn't really want to sketch in black, so I used white instead, which meant I had to have a different coloured background than usual, I'm not sure how this will effect my book later on, but I'm hoping it wont be too annoying, originally I was going to have my backgrounds white, but these concepts mean I'll probably have to change that. I'm still not 100% sure about layout either, but all my images are on separate layers so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

When it came to the illustration, I wanted to focus on the background first. Backgrounds are something I'm really not that good at in all honesty, mainly because I focus more on the character first and then can never get the background right, it just ends up looking like the character doesn't belong there. So for this illustration I wanted to try and break out of that bad habit and started sketching the background first, to hopefully make it more coherent.

I also wanted to work more on the background since it played quite a key part in the phobia, the snow. Something I realised whilst working on this painting is it's really hard painting with the colour white. I knew not to use full on white and have it more of a blue tone (or any other colour really,) but I still found it quite difficult, especially with so much white. I gathered some reference of clothing, hair, and very pale skin to try and help me out with this issue.

Once I had done the basic sketch for the background I began sketching out the character. The idea I had was to have her chasing after someone, presumingly the groom, maybe he bailed and didn't want to get married. That's one of the reasons I enjoyed doing this painting, because I felt like it had a bit more of a story to it.

Once I had done the basic sketch, I just continued working into it.

This is about where I got to at the end of the week, I'll continue working on it next week and hopefully start a new phobia.