Monday, September 15, 2008

Work in Progress


Hello folks, how are you doing today?
I decided to post a personal piece I'm working on. Although I'm not a big fan of posting things in progress.
I mean, it's nice because one can see the artist's process, but in my case, my process is kinda messy. It's not very "pretty". I have a vague idea about what I want to show but my head keeps spinning until the last stages of the painting.
Well, anyway, I hope you enjoy the process.
As you can see on panel 1, I started with very loose strokes to define some shapes and I didn't care much about color at this point. I only knew I wanted something warm and - at this stage - I thought I wanted the spaceship to be the focal point.
On panel 2 you can see that I decided to shift the focal point of the picture. It went from the ship to the creatures fighting one of the things coming out of the ship. That happened because I decided to work on the foreground and a thought came to mind. Damn you "What if..."! Also I defined the background a little more and worked a little on the main mountain and the ground.
On panel 3 I tried to vary the shape of the foreground monster-thingy because I still didn't know what I wanted exactly for the creature at this point. I added some bigger figures on the foreground, changed the shape of the ship, defined the mountains on the background and messed up the main mountain on the middle-ground.
On panel 4 I defined (better yet, fixed) the main mountain and I'm still not sure about the shape of the ship. Maybe I'll turn it into a more organic form, following the same 'style' as the worm-like creatures (which I now like, except for the spikes, I'm thinking about getting rid of them altogether). Then I defined some of the figures interacting with the creature and decided to vary the size of the bigger figures on the foreground, they felt too symmetrical before. I Also made the sky on the left side lighter because I want the focal point to be the struggle between the figures and the creature. Later I'll add some more layers of atmospheric perspective to knock back the ship and the mountain a little, they feel like they're getting too much attention at this point. I'll also introduce some tiny figures fighting the small creature on the right side of the picture. Oh, yeah, nevermind the colors, I'll be tweaking them towards the end. That'll be fun.
I'll be posting some more panels of this work in progress throughout the week and hopefully I'll finish it up by the weekend.
Thanks for stopping by.

2 comments:

Megan Wolfe said...

This is awesome, Doug. Iove all the detail going on in the background. I can't wait to see the finish. :)

Mauro Salgado said...

Bem legal Douglas, quero ver finalizado!
Ah estou fazendo mais coisas da corrida futuristica, vou mandar no seu mail.

Abç!