Saturday, May 26, 2012

IMC 2012 Assignment Prep

The assignment list for the 2012 Illustration Master Class came in a  couple of weeks ago, and for the record I'm really glad no one was in the room when I saw that Tristan and Isolde was one of them. I mean, the other assignments are cool and all, and I can't wait to see what my IMC classmates do with them, but oh man a courtly romance story that predated and then was integrated into Arthuriana? Yes.

I did a little bit of research before I started thumbing, but I made the decision not to read any specific tellings of it. What I wanted wasn't to show a specific scene or grand moment: instead, I wanted to look at the characters as individuals, and frame them in the context of the central pillar of the story - the adulterous affair. This is what interested me, this relationship the three of them had, because the heart of it is that both Tristan and Isolde love Mark, and they carry on their relationship in spite of knowing full well they are betraying him. (This seems to be a theme: the same can be said of Arthur and Gwenivere and Lancelot.)

First step: getting the crap and bald cliché out of my system. I figured out I wanted the garden pretty early.
Next step: feel out gesture, picture shape, etc.
The first spread up there shows my blank-mind oh-god-how-do-I-draw thumbs, which I used to get out of my initial deer in the headlights reaction. That freed me up for the next set, where I started working out what gesture I wanted, how I was going to build the image, what shape I wanted to work with, etc etc. I usually don't write so many notes, but I was working out my thought process as I went, and it turned out to be really helpful - enough so that I might be doing more of that in my future thumbs.

The one I wound up going with - the third from the top - went through two or three changes before I was satisfied. Instead of taking each right move and making a new thumb to further it (as I started to do and then gave up on) I did my editing on the thumb itself.

I scanned it in, scaled it up, printed it out, and transferred it. This rough is 7"x4.25". (I'll be scaling it up to 10.5"x6.625" for the drawing, and 21"x13.25" for the painting.)


Usually at this point I'd be preparing to start the final drawing, but although I have a reference photoshoot set up, all I'll actually be doing in the next two weeks are some clothing designs and probably a color study or two. There's no real halfway for me between a rough like this and a really tight drawing, and given that there are going to be a whole bunch of very talented professionals telling me to redraw/recompose/fix everything, rendering everything up now would be an exercise in futility.

Up next: those clothing and color studies I mentioned.

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