12/03, eh? - It's my birthday!

Today I'm officially in my mid-twenties... yikes!

I spent the entire weekend working on a new piece. Waking up Saturday morning I grabbed one of my bedside art books - The John Howe Fantasy Art Workshop - and got an immediate craving for pencil sketching. I'm going to talk a little about the process of this one since it was a bit different from my usual methods. I give you this new piece, a dramatic account of a woodsman's punishment for hurting a hamadryad's soul-tree, called "Shall We Count His Rings?":

SOME NOTES AND SKETCHES:

Normally I do digital paintings digitally - from thumbnail to sketch to completion. This go-round I spent more time than usual image-gathering, to enhance the surreal look, as well as the believability of the characters.

Honestly I've never been a landscape person. So I spent a few minutes at the window sketching branches:

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I asked myself "what makes a tree real to me?" What makes it alive? What's consistent and random about the shape of the branches? There's so much to be said about using live references. What used to feel like a collection of lines became a more intricate pattern, twisting and turning every which way.

Normally before starting something new, I take some time to thumbnail or draft a composition. A lot of the time the beginnings get covered up to become the actual work, but this go-round my initial ideas were very different from the final version, like this sketch, (complete with annoying shadows from my hand when I took the snapshot):

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The original plan (credit: Twig) was to have the woodsman's own axe buried in his back, the work of the fiesty tree spirit. A cool idea, but a.)The more violence a piece has in it, the less the size of the audience it will appeal to. And b.) In blocking out the composition, I thought it didn't create a dynamic enough connection between the characters. The ensnaring vine idea came about 50% of the way thru working, and I think it creates some nice focal lines, while not destroying the message that she's in charge.

When I was done with all my pencil sketching, I took some snaps and used a multiply layer in photoshop over a mildly-toned background to block in the woodsman and some of the tree branches (the original hamadryad and her main tree trunk I'd already sketched in Photoshop using a reference photo of myself). You can see in the beginning how different the layout was:

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Then laying in the major values:

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It's interesting that this is also the first time I've started in black & white maybe ever. I put all the color over top later. I kept some things consistent with my normal work practice - I rarely ever have more than 4 working layers in Photoshop at a time, and I only keep them as long as I need them before flattening the image. It makes it feel a bit more like a real canvas, and even though some people might say it's unwise to commit to things during early stages, I find that it gives me much tighter control over the overall color and lighting schemes (read: if I apply a Levels filter, eg., it affects everything instead of one element). If something needs to be taken out, I usually prefer painting over it like I would on a traditional piece than taking out a layer. Not to say that layers are bad, that's just how I work.

I hope you enjoy it! I lost half of the feeling in my right hand by the time the last stroke was laid down (about 28 hours total). It was a real challenge for so many reasons; I consider it to be one of those "technical breakthrough" pieces for me because I found some new methods I think will help me in the future.. And it was literally the last thing I did when I was still 23 - it was done and committed to disk at exactly 11:59 last night.