FMP Week 15

The first thing I decided to do this week was revisit the butterfly character. It's been quite a while and at this point, I still don't like it and it doesn't really fit with any of the other characters. I felt like this character was the perfect one to mix beauty and horror together, since butterflies are beautiful. Because I decided to completely redo this character I started right at the beginning, coming up with ideas and iterations.

I quite liked the pointy feet, and the slightly altered proportions in the face to look a little more bug like. I really liked the patches from the previous butterfly character I created, so I tried to incorporate that in some way. I really like the iteration right at the end, wasn't completely sold on the cape so I later decided to get rid of that in the colour iterations.

I also decided to get rid of the antenna, I instead wanted to include actual butterflies in the final concept. I didn't do many colour concepts because I was sold on the yellow/orange one. The complete opposite colour to my original concept. I don't think blues are that easy to make into a creepy character, blue reads as more of a sad colour than anything else. So from these I moved on to the final concept.

I really like the colours of this character, but I have to say this character was really hard to paint. Not skill wise just mentally. I hate butterflies, I'm quite scared of them they just make me really anxious, more so in real life. So I found this concept really hard to paint because I painted actual butterflies. I'm really glad I did it though because I'm really pleased with how it turned out and I honest feel a little better about butterflies now! This concept (as well as the iteration stuff) only took about a day to do so I had plenty of time to get an illustration done as well as starting another character!

This is the final illustration, I'm pretty pleased with it, though I think it is a little too orange, that was the main critique I got too, but overall I'm happy with it. It took a little longer than expected so I only had time to do some iterations for the next character, but I'm not stressing out too much because I've still got plenty of time!

The next phobia I decided to do was Trypophobia, which is the fear of holes. I knew I wanted a character with holes in the skin, but I also kind of wanted to play around with clothing with holes in, maybe in some sort of pattern.

I also did some face iterations to try and figure out the placement of the holes on the face, since I thought for the illustration I'd do another portrait.

Out of the iterations above I preferred the last one (of both of them) so I did a final concept of it!

I went with this concept because she seems quite enclosed, I thought with the clothing it should look quite ragged, but I wanted to include the holes so the theme continued throughout. I kept the colours pretty basic too because I wanted the focus to be on the holes. The next thing I worked on was the illustration, I wanted the holes to be a key part of it so that was always in the back of my mind.

At this point I wasn't too happy with the final result, so I went back and edited things a bit more.

I decided to show more of the body, changed the tone of the skin a little, to make the redness stand out a little more.

Once I had spent time tweaking it I finally felt like I was finished. This is the final version and I'm pretty pleased with it. It's kinda gross, which I guess is the point! This is my last illustration, so starting next week I'm going to start organising it all into a book. It's scary knowing that I'm almost finished with this project, especially early. Bring on next week!