A Parliament of Owls - Pt. 1: Thumbnails and Color Sketch

For the next several posts, I'll be documenting the creation of my latest illustration "A Parliament of Owls", a scene from C. S. Lewis' book The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair. This is a project I've wanted to attempt for some time. The goal is to create a finished illustration for each chapter in the book, along with various sketches and drawings which could potentially be used for interior illustrations. My "process" is constantly evolving, but I thought that all my kind readers would benefit from seeing how I work.

Of course, before I start drawing, I'm formulating ideas. This usually accumulates into lots of random doodles, lines and bad ideas on a piece of printer paper or my sketchbook. I read and reread passages of the book to make sure I'm thinking about the character & settings right. It's all about memorizing how I see the scene and getting something on the paper that starts to concrete ideas in my mind. Then to work out the composition of the piece, I do thumbnail sketches. And in this case I did... 3. You should do a lot more than this, just to work out the best ideas. Some people do hundreds. I say that's ridiculous. I did three. I'll probably regret it later, but there you go.

This is where a great tool comes into play...

PHOTOSHOP!

I often use this tool for creating thumbnails for several reasons. They are as follows:

1. I'm lazy. Too lazy to draw thumbnails on paper (okay, that's not really a good reason)

2. You can add grayscale value to your thumbnails and thus do value studies at the same time.

3. You can use the Lasso tool to quickly select and resize elements of your thumbnail to experiment with various compositions. This is the best reason I use Photoshop for thumbnails, and it saves me from having to redraw stuff over and over.

Okay, so in the sketches above I have limited myself to roughly 3 values - a dark, light and middle tone. I'm sure you fine folks have heard enough else about composition, size, contrast, and all that jazz, so I won't bore you (but if you need help with this stuff, leave me a comment, I'll go over it with you). After establishing basic value relationships, I move on to the next step...

This is a new step for me, but one that I have seen used with a great deal of success from some of my favorite illustrators, and that is the color sketch. This is again an area where Photoshop excels. Color exploration is certainly one of Photoshop's strong points, and you can use it to quickly lay in color, and manipulate it in a myriad of ways. Here, I laid down a layer set to Multiply over a copy of the original thumbnail sketch (#1). Eustace and Jill are in a tower late at night, having just been carried there by Glimfeather, a giant owl, to confer with the rest of the Narnian owls about a secret quest.

Nighttime scenes are difficult because the colors become desaturated and slightly blue. One great way I've found to explore color options for a piece is to paint in a "wild" color that you might not think would go. Then find the colors that complement it - color wheels are a great way to figure this out (but don't use them like a crutch). In this case I painted the whole thing in a deep blue. I wasn't sure what color would work for Jill's cloak, but by working off the color wheel I found that a desaturated reddish brown provided the perfect contrast to make her and Eustace stand out from the dark and shadowy tower and the Parliament of Owls.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that quick overview of this part of the process. Maybe you learned something. Maybe you didn't. Maybe you're ready to go to YouTube and watch cute kitten videos (please don't, go draw something instead). But at any rate maybe this has gotten you started thinking about how you can improve your next painting or drawing. Thanks for reading!

Next time: Character & Finished Sketches!

Brief Value Studies

Some very quick value studies in Photoshop for an upcoming drawing. I wanted to finish it today, but alas, you shall have to wait another day or so. Can you guess who this is?

#146 Atmospheric Thumbnails

I'm trying to discipline myself to post on this blog on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday basis.

"Well Will you're doing a pretty awful job of it" you say.

But I'm posting. And it's Monday. And I haven't made a whole lot of progress on Desert Chase (although I did stretch some watercolor paper today, in preparation for another Hobbit portrait - more on that soon). So I rummaged through my cluttered hard drive to find some stuff in the archives that had never seen the light of day on the blog. These are atmospheric thumbnails for a school project I did a while back. They were so much fun to do. I will probably do these in preparation for my next illustration. But until then, you may enjoy these - on which, I will not elaborate to a great degree, only to tell you that they involove a lot of falcons, H. G. Wells Martians, and people in top hats running for their lives.

-Will

#088 Through the Flames

Well, it's been a long time since my last post... things around here have been pretty hectic. My school schedule has been super crowded taking a class this summer. It's a tough class that I've heard many of my fellow students say was difficult for them in the past as well. But this drawing (above) was a finished drawing for an atmospheric perspective assignment we had. And I was super proud of it - I think it's one of my favorite drawings that I've ever done. It comes from a story I have in the pipeline about giant falcons and dragons (in case you didn't gather that from the image, which I hope you did)!

Anyway, just thought I'd put something new up. I am warning you though: the next several months could be pretty sparse as far as posting goes. I'm actually planning to possibly take a break from school for a semester for a trip that's in the planning stages (no, I'm not disclosing any more information than that just yet!). But I'm sure it will inevitably turn into more artistic opportunities that will be shared here. Just stay tuned!

#086 New Painting WIP

Here's the beginning value stage for a new painting I've started. I think it's gonna be pretty cool. I've got two other projects going at the same time before my summer semester starts: "Jewel Heist: Mars", and my final personal revisions for my Silver Chair cover. Honestly, I'm ready to move on from the book cover project. There's a lot of things I want to fix, but I'm not sure yet if it's worth it. I'm just tired of looking at it so much! Anyway, I've got until the 15th of June to make revisions before I can reveal what I'm going to do with it... he he he.
They say new artists need to get their first couple of hundred paintings out of their system before they really start getting good. I believe it, so the more the merrier my friends!
Happy Photoshop Painting!

#082 Silver Chair Book Cover (Value Comp)

This is the value comp for the book cover assignment we are in the middle of in class right now. I chose to do the Silver Chair from the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis. Silver Chair is one of my favorite books in the series, and I felt like doing a scene from this one instead of the ones already adapted to film would keep me from being influenced too much in my depiction of the scene.
I chose to depict the trio of Puddleglum, Eustace Scrubb, and Jill Pole as they approach Harfang Castle, the dwelling of the Giants. I thought that this would better reinforce the idea that they were on a quest, instead of focusing on some of the more pivotal scenes from the book, such as the part where Rilian destroys the Chair.

Hope you like! Color next week...