Fairy Tale Progress: Puss in Boots

Spent a few hours yesterday and today sketching up and finishing a character concept for this week's CHOW over on conceptart.org. Below is the line-art in pencil; the above is the "final" colored in Photoshop.

Queen Titania: Bits and Pieces

Here are a few sketches of my "Queen Titania" illustration in progress for CHOW 146. I just read that there has been a one day extension -- yay! I might actually have something to post for the CHOW Final Burning rather than holding off and posting in the CA Finally Finished section.

The rough layout posted below was finally sketched on paper after much internal sketching in my head. I just quickly put it all on paper in a rather rough layout sketch so I wouldn't forget the various groupings and characters I wanted to include to tell my story of Queen Titania since I was also working on a few other things this past week. The top drawing and the "fox and hounds" at the bottom are some of the final bits I'm still wrapping up before pulling all of the elements together and coloring them in Photoshop...

For the final drawings I'm working with a 2H pencil to do a quick overall layout, then go to an HB pencil for detail, and finishing up with a 4B pencil for outlining.

Extra-curricular for the Week

Here are a couple of preliminary sketch explorations for this week's creative extra-curricular activity: CHOW 146 -- Queen Titania.

Having a bit of buggy-ness with the revised code in my website update...hope to have that fixed in the next few days while I continue to work on a few other items on my studio "to-do" list.

Gabriella as The Italian Plague Doctor

Interesting topic over on this week's CHOW: The Plague Doctor. To give the character more emotional context, the brief has the following account from a fictional character who was supposed to have lived during the time:

“My name is Gabriella. My father was a doctor, and I learned from him how to treat various maladies and to set bones and which herbs and mixtures and such would treat this illness or that.

“My father, he died two months ago from the Black Death. I did not know what to do, so I donned his mask, gown, his boots and stick and gloves, and try to care for those I can.

“I try to help. But they die anyway. So many. I bring the flowers and perfumes, the hot drinks, the blessed artifacts, leeches – I even smoke like a man now to ward the Death away from me! The laxatives do not seem to work, and I hate covering the poor souls in mercury and placing them in ovens to burn the disease out. They scream so….

“May god have mercy on our souls, for I do not believe anyone shall survive…”

Another nice little twist in the brief, while the account is supposed to be from Italy in the mid to late 1300's (or 14th century), the image the art director posted in the brief for the Plague Doctor is actually from the 17th century. Which sort of means the artists can be a bit creative with how they interpret the costume design.

The above is my initial quick rough sketch. I'll post some more explorations over the rest of the weekend. Since the due date for this exercise is tomorrow, it will have to be a quick series of studies and one color version picked for the final round. Although I may choose to do a tighter illustration later like for the Herald when I have more time to spend on it. We'll see.