Red Shoes - Complete

This image was originally done in color, but upon completion, I found that the color detracted from the focus of the piece, her red shoes. So, I put a mask around the shoes and turned the rest grayscale. I think the result is more effective. Though it's a little bit sad to spend all that time coloring just to throw out colors at the end. Eh, c'est la vie!

Speaking of which, here is the original color version:

I tried to make everything gloomy and gray except for the girl, but I'm not too happy with how the colors turned out (another reason I went grayscale). Any opinions on it?

Red Shoes WIP 3

Clean lineart, ready for coloring.

Red Shoes WIP 2

Rough Sketch

Red Shoes WIP 1

Here's my next project for the portfolio: A mock book cover based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Red Shoes. From my childhood, I recalled the story being about a girl who puts on a pair of red ballet slippers that force her to dance until she dies from exhaustion. Upon reading the actual story as part of my research for the illustration, however, I was surprised to learn that the original version of the tale is quite different, with some pretty heavy Christian symbolism and morality. In any case, the story has some nice visual elements in it.

Yesterday I did some warm up sketches of dancers and ballerinas. Ballerinas have wonderful poses with strong silhouettes. Very inspiring. I hope to capture some of that in the final piece.

Afterwards, I started working out some thumbnails, figuring out how to arrange the visual elements I wanted to show into a compelling book cover. I settled on the one with a star next to it (lower left corner), and serendipitously stumbled upon a back cover design as well. I think it'll make for a nice companion piece.

Dragon Rider WIP 1

New picture for the children's illustration portfolio I'm working on. My idea was to depict a little girl curled up in a chair, so engrossed in reading her book that she imagines herself as the heroine of the tale.

Every picture I do starts with a thumbnail sketch, no larger than a couple inches tall. This allows me to jot down all the important details of an idea quickly, and "feel out" a composition without spending too much time on it. This way, I can easily try multiple takes if something's not working.

In this case, I was satisfied with the original thumbnail, and move straight onto the rough sketch, a full-sized drawing based off the thumbnail. Sometimes I will work the rough sketch to completion, but in this case it was too messy, so I transferred the drawing onto another sheet of paper to do my final pass (and made a couple tweaks to the composition while I was at it).

This is where I currently am: the lines are clean and ready for colors!