Saturday 4 February 2012

Illustration Friday 5 - Suspense

This week's word is suspense, and I am looking forward to making a dynamic and fun to look at book cover!

I stumbled upon a wonderful illustration by Thomton Utz that really caught my eye.
I always love extreme closeups, having the face take up most of the canvas is dynamic, but also tricky. While I personally don't much like the interaction between the foreground and background, it's definitely creative and visually effective.
With that, I'm going for a composition that includes an extreme close up and smaller figure to tie it all together.
I tried a few different ways to pull this off to find the best result.
I sketched out a loose framework in blue, and then went in and refined the details, darkest values to lightest. The more I worked and refined, I started to blur out the guidelines I'd done in blue.
In the end, I ended up with a dark, painterly style.

Suspense

1 comment:

  1. Oh man, this one is great! I like how the main figure (portrait? I need a thesaurus) goes from being very tightly rendered on the left to being drawn more loosely and less defined as you move left. It really guides the eye and provides emphasis on the smaller figure standing on his collar. Also love the blood on the collar connecting the two

    ReplyDelete