Work in Progress Illustration!

Hi Hive,

I've been working on a larger piece that I thought would be fun to talk about as I work thru it.

This piece is called "Widow Maker" and the concept is about facing your inner demons. I love the idea of monsters being symbolic of inner struggle. This one is going to be focused around the relentless march of time slipping away as we all grow older and age.

Here's the rough design of the concept I settled on. Most of the other roughs were very similar, so I decided to just go forward with it. A desert or rocky campsite seemed like an interesting setting, and would help give the monster some interesting poses for staging.

Here was my first pass at fleshing out the scene a bit more. Practicing some linework, thinking about textures and scene props, working thru composition.

Here's a second pass on the scene. I removed some of the rock features, added more supplemental props into the set to help tell more of a story, and began to play with different kinds of foliage. Sand has historically been a representative of time, so I wanted to try and use a desert setting to help sell that idea. I want to hint at this piece taking place in an almost hour-glass dream-state setting.

Anyways, that's it for now. This is a pretty big piece and so far I'm about 15hrs into it. Will probably take another 15-20hrs but we'll see!

Here's a little sneak peak of the coloring stage I'm currently working on:

Thanks for following along!