Interior scene idea
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@Kevin-Longueil I would like to be a professional!
Your suggestion is kind of what I was going to do once I nail down the colors. There will be an icy puddle under the monster, some icicles and cold air. If I could just get past this stage though! My head is swirling because of all the colors I have to choose.@evilrobot I have a very basic idea in mind for a dummy book but no idea what the ending should be!
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Those images with the blue rabbit are very very charming - I think there were some story ideas exchanged when you submitted your piece for Third Thursday which were good starting points. If writing makes you freeze (and I can relate to that), why not try a wordless book? There is a lot of story potential already in these three images: rabbit sees the animal singing and wants to sing too. He is completely out of tune, though, and pesters the animals in the wood with his awkward singing. You could show different animals having different reactions to his songs (fleeing, covering their ears, hiding their head in a hole, hugging together in despair, etc...)...he is sad and dejected and wants to give it all up. Suddenly, he hears somebody singing just out-of-tune as himself. He peeks from behind a bush and, lo and behold, it's a girl blue rabbit that sings just as badly! Last spread is a lovely tuneless choir of the two...
Sorry, got carried away by a silly idea, but I really believe that those three images have a lot of potential and you should do something with them.
As for the interior scene, I think the point of view you chose for the scene may not be the best one. It is one of those ping-pong, two-focus compositions that tend to flatten all images (Will and Jake talk about this problem specifically in the critique of one of the old Third Thursdays, the one with the prompt "Love". That may be the reason why the image looks boring to you. A worm's viewpoint (low, looking up) may give a sense of scale and menace to the monster and get rid of the white floor area, or maybe a view from behind the dog, with the monster coming towards him....
There is a wonderful layout drawing from Disney of a store similar to the one you describe - unfortunately I could not find it online (I have it in a book). However, you can see the sequence animated here:
How to hook up your home theatre
between 1:27 and 1:34 minutes. Maybe it can give you some idea or inspiration. One thing I notice is that they muted all the shelves completely color-wise, while they put a lot of garish colors on the banners hanging from the ceiling. -
Oh my gosh I finally broke through the horribleness and here's where I'm at. I want to stay up all night and finish shadowing/refining but my body won't let me. This went through so many restarts! I'll try to post all the junk tomorrow.
www.lydiamueller.com
Twitter @lydesigns -
@Lydia-M First: love that monster! I also think the background elements are looking really cool.
One critique would be that the kid looks like a sprinter getting ready to plow into the monster (i.e., fight it) but the expression is more like "Yikes!"
If you were to keep the crouching pose maybe recede the figure to back behind that tipping shelf (although kids might look at that and think the kid is about to be crushed) OR re-draw it so that it is more of a fleeing/looking back pose.
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I love this! All the details are amazing...including security sensor by the door. Wow! I agree with @mattramsey about the kid. There are a few contradictions--He is poised to lunge at the monster, but his face looks like he is startled; he is wearing a coat, scarf and hat as if he knows he will be battling a cold monster, but he is also wearing flip flops and shorts (though my son would totally try and walk out of the house into a blizzard dressed like that!) so I can't decide if he is there prepared to fight or surprised and about to flee. But I love the colors, reflection, monster, details... great piece!
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Lovely piece, overall very successful balance of color and composition - I like it a lot! I agree that the kid is a little confusing - especially the way he is dressed and the pose. Indeed, looking at your first thumbnails I was convinced it was a dog. Another thing that I perceive as ambiguous is the monster's face. his mouth is very dark but his eyes have almost no contrast. At a first sight, i thought the eye was the red dot at the back of his head (which actually is background). It took me a few seconds to see the eyes. Maybe increasing the contrast there or reducing the contrast at the mouth could address that.
However, it is overall very nice, good job solving the composition and color! -
Me:
This thing.
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I wanted to say thank you all for your input on this. I stared at this for so long that I couldn't see certain things (her expression for example) until I changed it. Here's some process images and a sample of my giant reference folder...
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All the work was worth it, it is an excellent piece! I also collect a thousand references for large illustrations - as many others do - it is very good practice! A trick used by Bobby Chiu and others is to place all references around the image in PS (on different layers for different groups of things) and then use two PS windows for the piece, so that you can zoom in on both the reference and the part you are working on. It is a very good way of staying organized (and I miss it a lot when I work in ProCreate....).
Congratulations on a great illustration! -
Fantastic illustration! Well done! You should be proud of it.
