Illustration Friday: Suspense!

This week's word for Illustration Friday is Suspense. This immediately made me think of those old, sensationalistic horror and thriller comics from the 1950s; stuff like Tales from the Crypt and the like. So my idea for this week's illustration was to create a mocked up comic book cover.




Now, for this particular illustration I drew from a wide variety of inspirations but my starting point was the work of Rowland B Wilson: A mid century cartoonist, animator and illustrator who has done a work for such varied companies as Disney, Esquire, the New Yorker and Playboy. Not only did looking at his work give me an idea for the subject matter (That being high fantasy) but also the soft, textured, painterly technique I decided to use to illustrate it.



 Aside from Mr Wilson I would also end up drawing inspiration from artists Frank Frazetta and Maurice Noble. Many of you are probably familiar with Frazetta, if not in name then at least in the work he did: He was essentially the god of pulp and fantasy art. His work essentially canonized the aesthetic adapted by fantasy artists in the mid 20th century. The bold, contrasting colours, loose painterly style and focus on geometrical/textured background elements were all elements that I tried to incorporate into my illustration




 Maurice Noble is also an artist whose work many of you may be familiar with without being aware of it. He was one of the primary background artists for Warner Brother animation studios through the 1940s and 50s working primarily under director Chuck Jones. His backgrounds were characterized by bright, pinkish-hued colours, strange geometric forms and heavily distorted perspective. He provided the background art for such animated shorts as Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 century and What's Opera, Doc?




 My process for creating this particular piece was fairly straightforward. I began with thumbnails to try and work out ideas:

I liked the more literal interpretation the first two concepts gave to the term "Suspense" but I ultimately preferred the composition of the final thumbnail (And it would give me an opportunity to draw one of my favorite things: Old ruined architecture). From there I roughed out the layout of the thumbnail in full

 Then blocked in the base colours for the composition

 And rendered the final piece

 As a final touch I played around with the colours of the individual elements of the composition to maximize the contrast until I got a colour scheme I was happy and added the comic cover elements, with leaving me with the final products