bfowler.com

I did this paining as a contest between myself and a few friends.  The idea was to redesign the Wicked Witch of the West from the classic Wizard of Ox.  I had the idea the the Witch after having  somehow survived her death in the original movie comes back to hunt down and take out Dorothy and her friends.  She starts off with knocking off Glinda the Good Witch who she has always been jealous of.  There is a little bit of a psychosis going as she takes over Glinda’s appearance somewhat but with some disturbing twists.  As she takes out each member of the remaining members of Dorothy’s party she commemorates the occasion with a tattoo.  She saves the dog Toto for last in the end decided to keep him for her own pet.  The poor puppy’s hair has all turned white from the shock of seeing his friends and former master cut down by the evil witch.

This piece was done as a commission.  I’m beginning to feel really good with this style as quick commissions.  I really liked how the colors came out on this one (you can’t go wrong with compliment color schemes) and the I think the composition is one of my better ones.  I love creating pictures with a lot of negative space.

The Hurakan challenge over at ArtOrder is humming right along.  Here are my character design and thumbnails for the book cover.  After researching a little Mayan culture which the character is based on I took a simple but hopefully powerful approach to the character.  I knew I wanted an old broken figure but full of power.  Somewhere between an evil Yoda and Zeus.  I wanted him to look human like but with other world like characteristics.

I’ve been participating in the Hurakan challange over at the Art Order Blog.   Art Order is a blog by senior Art Direction Jon Schindehette of Dungeons and Dragons and Wizards of the Coast.  He very generouly offered tips, insights, and this cool contests.

We started a few weeks ago but the basic concept is to design the Mayan God, “Hurakan” with the Dungeons and Dragons universe in mind.  Then we’d proceed to create a book cover.  That challange only has a few weeks to go but I thought I’d post my progress.

Here are the list of assignments broken down.

Phase 1 character silhouettes (completed)
Phase 2 character thumbs (completed)
Phase 3 Black and White detailed character drawings & compositional Book Cover thumbnails (completed)
Phase 4 Character color roughs & Black & White Book Cover detailed drawings (completed)
Phase 5 Final color Character development & Book Cover color rough
Phase 6 Book Cover Final

Here are the silhoutte based on the character brief (seen here).  You can also read all about the challange in that same link. Doing silhouettes is a really underrated way to begin character designs and really just drawing in general.  It allows you to focus on the actual design of a character without worrying about the details of the drawing.  In basic drawing it forces you to deal with overall shapes and picture compostion.  It’s just a great way to distil down and focus on some important aspects in the beginning of design or drawing.  I liked these three out of the dozen or so I did but as luck would have it I ended up going in a completely different direction.  More on that in a future post.

I’m going to spread this out over a few posts as I don’t want to post a novel here in one setting.

While I love the fantasy, sci-fi, and comic genre I have a huge love for drawing the human figure and portraits so whenever I get some spare time to do some studies they usually end up being some type of figure or facial study.  I try to limit myself to a time limit to work on my speed too.  This one of Jessica Alba took me an hour and a half.  She did star in the Fantastic Four and Sin City movies so it’s not like I’ve abandoned my inner geek.

Here’s another commission I finished last week and am only now getting around to posting it.  Inks, acrylics and colored pencils.   Thanks for looking.