Were-Raccoon Pirate WIP
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Because I'm taking a staycation this week, I'm giving myself the challenge of starting and completing an illustration before I go back to the office. So, because my wife has wisely encouraged me to finish up projects that have been hanging around, unfinished, let's jump in a time machine and go all the way back to the terrifying age of... Spring Break 2021. It was during that fateful week that I did Monster Bash with my kids, in which we all drew monster body parts (as well as random items), and blindly pulled the pieces we had to assemble into a new monster design. Here are the cards I got:
Pretty weird stuff, but I felt that they obviously combined into a pirate and his parrot being transformed into a were-raccoon and cycloptic pinata by cursed Aztec gold, which looked like this quick sketch:
And then... it just sat in my sketchbook while I got distracted by and pulled into a hundred different directions. Time traveling back to yesterday, I dusted off the sketchbook, did some quick research, and started work on the project proper.
Here's the rough sketch, just getting the layout and proportions out of my head as quick and messy as possible.
I then rolled straight into final sketch, getting things to make just enough sense to serve as a blueprint for the ink lines that I'll be putting down today.
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@ajillustrates great use of a staycation! Love to see the inked version of this. And great game, need to remember until my kids are a bit older
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Project Day 2: Beginning inks, just kinda feeling my way around, focusing mainly on clothing and props.
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Project Day 3: Completed inks for the two characters. Really liking how this is going.
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@ajillustrates it looks awesome! Do you work digital or traditional?
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@Chantal-Goetheer Thanks! I work both traditionally and digitally (and sometimes combined), but for this project I’m going all digital.
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@ajillustrates love the cyclops parrot
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@Griffin-McPherson Thank you! He was pretty tricky, since a bird's head is absolutely not constructed to to have anything right in the middle of it. I must have drawn and erased the eye 5 time.
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Project Day 4: Busy day doing some pre-Thanksgiving activities with the kids, so I only had time to ink the treasure chest and cave.
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@ajillustrates Your ink work is amazing!
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kirsten.mcgonigal.art/
Portfolio Site: www.kirstenmcgonigalart.com -
@kirsten-mcg Thank you! It’s my favorite part of the process.
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Project Day 5: After taking Thursday and Friday off to focus on family and food, I got back onto this to start blocking out colors.
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Project Day 6: Okay, turns out 1 week was way too short to finish this piece, as color blocking is taking longer than expected.
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Project Day 7: The color blocks are finished, so I can finally start rendering textures and values tomorrow.
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Project Day 8: The areas that are in the shade (away from the moonlight) have been blocked in, and I'm in progress of defining forms with darker values. -
Project Day 9: Finished darker values on the characters and foreground, and rolled into lighter values. -
@ajillustrates would you like any suggestions?
Website: www.von-Nimmermehr.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/von_nimmermehr_illustration/ -
@von_Nimmermehr Sure! I’m open to advice.
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@ajillustrates
firstly i think you rendered the picture just fine and i looks really nice.I just wondered if he is kneeling in the water, because it looks odd like this, being above the water. You could push this a bit more though.
Also i took a look at some pictures of palmtees and where an how they grow. mostly you find single palmtrees on a beach and a palmtreewood in the jungle but since you can see the background it doesnt align wit the beach look or the jungle look.
In order for the Water to be in this cave it runs down or in the same level of the floor and you are looking a little bit from above in the cave, so i would think the level of the background vulcano/Hills isn't right.
Maybe it's just me but it doesn seem to fit.
Website: www.von-Nimmermehr.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/von_nimmermehr_illustration/ -
@von_Nimmermehr Well, I haven't done any work on the water or background (aside from putting in the base colors), so once that's done, hopefully it will fit in more. The pirate is kneeling in about 6" of water, and that will be painted as a separate layer over his legs (and the foreground rocks) once they are complete. My plan is to go pretty watercolor painterly on the background, so some stuff will probably shift a bit, and I may even remove all the ink lines back there in the process. At that point, that's when I'll paint in some distant folliage for the jungle at the base of the volcano.
