Illustration Friday: Capable

Or rather a lack of capability...

So lately I've been swamped with work on a comic and have been neglecting my Illustration Fridays. So I've decided to get caught up on some of the old concepts and use them as inspiration to design things for the comic I'm working on.

One of the prompts from a previous week was "capable" and I immediately knew what to do with this one: The comic I'm working on is about two less than capable treasure hunters so I decided to do a double page spread of them showing off their general incompetence.

Now the splash page I'm doing is actually an updated version of an older comic I did so i already had a version of this one done up:

Now I like some of the things I did in this old one (Mainly the textures) but I felt like I could do better. So I drafted up thumbnails some thumbnails trying to work out better shots. The first was a very similar, 3-point perspective shot with a bit more of an extreme perspective view:

But this one still didn't really speak to me. So I drafted up another version with a slightly different layout:

But it still wasn't speaking to me. Slightly frustrated I decided to take the entire thing in a completely different direction and drafted up a brand new concept that removed the monster and had the two of them as tiny figures helplessly suspended over a wide backdrop:

Bingo. This was the concept I liked. So with the idea of how to lay things out taken care of I had to look into how I wanted to render this scene. I would end up drawing my inspiration from the illustration work of Robert J Lee:




I wanted to render the scene in a similar, heavily textured way so the viewer would really get a sense of the rough stonework of the tomb the two characters were exploring.

With that decided it was a simple matter of laying down the groundwork of the scene

And building things up from there...