Illustration Friday - Week 1

I have started a 14 week creative challenge! To conceptualize and create a finished character design in an promotional artwork, once a week based on Illustration Friday, found here:
http://www.illustrationfriday.com/

Week 1's keyword is... Grounded.

THUMBNAILS & INSPIRATION

I started off by sketching everything that the word brought to mind. It didn't matter if it was relavent or not, I just had to get the pencil moving. Eventually, based on one of many meanings of grounded ie; kid in trouble, I came up with two characters.

Now that I had a fairly solid idea of what the characters look and attitude is, I needed to think of a way to set them nicely in a composition.
I was told of an artist named Sheilah Beckett, and after browsing through some of her work, I found there was a few pieces that really spoke to me compositionally. I loved how some of her work had separate elements linked together in a way it became one solid element.

One specifically drew my attention.

The colours are beautiful, and she brings elements of an environment to help establish the characters surroundings without use of a full background. The grass and flowers become part of the girl and establish a setting.

So now I'm moving on to make a few rough sketches to try and emulate this kind of set up in my own work.

ROUGH WORK


So after the thumbnails were done, I started exploring different ways to illustrate the characters in a way that represents their attitude and the theme.
I drew out numerous different concepts, and this is what I ended up with.

I decided to go with the first one I did, since it best represented the Grounded theme, and I really feel it had the best 'movement' out of all of them.
Now that I fleshed out so many ideas, I am ready to move on and make the final copy.

FINAL STEP

I took my chosen rough draft and cleaned it up, and lined in Photoshop. From there, I created new layers as I added colour and effects.

Once it was all colored, I used a pattern and gradient effect on the final merge to give it a smooth and comic like look and feel.
Then I cleaned up and finished the "base" that the two characters are standing on, created a title and border, and voila! "Volume "1 of the Illustration Friday Challenge!