International Women's Day Colour thumbnails and Comprehensive

More progress on my International Women's day poster:

PREPARE

Alright. So the word for this week's Illustration Friday was "Prepare". Now this one didn't strike me with as solid an inspiration as last week's so this one took a little bit more thinking. After trawling around Flickr for some inspiration for a while I stumbled across this image by George Samerjan:

Now this image made me think back to something I've always been a big fan of: Pulp Sci-Fi covers. It was then that I got my idea for what this week's illustration would be: Some sort of astronaut with a ray gun preparing to take on a huge robot. So I whipped myself up some thumbnails:

I eventually settled on the composition in image number one but with the more humanoid robot from the other thumbnails. In hindsight I think number 3 would have made for a better composition, but at the time I really wanted the landscape to be a big focus which heavily influenced my decision. I then went on to sketch out the landscape:

Then did a little rendering:

Sketched out the figures:

Then coloured them in, added effects and added them to the final scene:

In the end I love the landscape I painted for this was probably my favorite part

Oceans in the Sky short comic

Hey everybody, just wanted to share a short comic I made a while ago. It is for a sort of recurring comic series I'm making in my spare time called Oceans in the Sky about treasure hunting in space

I'll post more of these as I make them

Illustration Fridays: Week 1

Hello All,

One of the major projects I've decided to attach myself to is participating in Illustration Friday. The basic idea, for those of you who don't really want to click the link, is to do a piece of art every week based on a preselected word posted on the website. This week's word was "Grounded" and I almost immediately was struck with a very vivid idea for a design: That of some sort of child/vegetable hybrid that was actually imbedded in the ground, crying out over its fate.

When I first began my work on this idea I looked to the rather twisted work Mark Newgarden did for the Garbage Pail kids line of trading cards. However around the same time I started work on the actual final drawing I stumbled across a few galleries of illustrations done by English illustrator Gerald Scarfe. Looking at Scarfe's work and the grotesque way he distorted the human face inspired me to take the project in an entirely new direction. Rather than a vegetable child crying out over being grounded I changed the subject into a rather distorted human face screaming out in anguish superimposed over some sort of root vegetable.

From here I sketch out the initial design of the head (Reworking it as I go):

Then I begin inking:

And finally add colour and effects to create the finished product:

Margaret Atwood Thumbnails

Hello Everyone,

I just thought I should take a moment to introduce myself and get this blog a'rolling. I'm Steven Alphonse and I'm a graphic designer/illustrator/cartoonist and I'm going to be using this space primarily to document and share the work I'm currently doing as well as let you, the viewer, get a bit of a look at how I create things behind the scenes.

To start things off I just wanted to post a set of thumbnails I did for a poster I'm designing for International Women's Day.

As you can see from the handy little title on that first thumbnail the subject of my poster is award winning Canadian authour Margaret Atwood. And as you can also see from looking at the rest of these thumbnails things are pretty rough and sketchy right now. I did these mostly to lay down some concepts and play with composition, so while they may not be much now they're hopefully going to turn into something fairly nice

My first idea for this poster was actually inspired by a recently done series of redesigns for the covers of Atwoods back catalogue. The general recurring theme of these redesigns was that the organic bits of the people on the cover were photographs while their clothing was drawn in a much more minimalistic, sparse style. I thought it might be an interesting design option to mimic for the poster, though with hand painted elements replacing the photographs.

My next idea took inspiration from an old illustration by the spectacular Al Parker. I simply love the way the smaller figures in the illustration are interacting with the main portraits hair and thought I could incorporate a similar interaction into one of my ideas. My basic thought is to have Atwood as the main focus of the poster with several characters and elements of her various writings sort of "springing forth" from her head.

My final idea also took a cue from Al Parker and an illustration he did for TV guide. My thought was to incorporate the very rough, textured approach he took to this illustration and apply it to a double portrait of Ms Atwood: One portrait representing herself as a young authour at the start of her career, the other representing her as she is presently.

Needless to say I still have a fair bit of work ahead of me, but I will keep you all updated as I continue

Update: I've done a second batch of thumbnails for this project that include more typographical elements integrated into the overall design