10 hour SURPRISE illustration!

Not the mermaid illustration. ^_^

Well there you have it folks, this is my MERMAID ILLUSTRATION. What? No MERMAIDS?! Oh...you are right. Sigh....haha. Once again I am posting and it isn't my mermaid illustration...but I have a good reason!

I was spurred on to make this illustration after I had a conversation with my good friend Amelia Parris about what my current work lacked. We came to the conclusion what I needed was to spend MORE time in the FINAL rendering stage. This is a bit difficult since most everything in my illustrations is made up.

My initial plan was to work at publishing size, double the inches after practically rendering everything, and then once done cleaning up and adding final details shrink it back down. This actually worked, but not in the way I anticipated. This worked in the sense it simplified my rendering at a lower size resolution so that I ARRIVED faster than if I had worked initially large.

My second solution was to break the single TRADITIONAL narrative format(which is what I have been doing practically my whole life) apart. THis allowed me to relax, have fun and actually kept me engaged for the entire piece. I found myself motivated to render every clear random detail, more and more because of this non-linear format. I had so much fun working on it that from about 3:30pm to 3:30am (I total of 9.5-10 working hours) I practically worked on it straight! (and let me tell you I had a BAD hand cramp! haha)

The other decision I made in order to spend more time in the rendering stage was to use more reference photos. In the end my characters were a bit more realistic than usual, but I was surprised at how much actually came from my head. (my personal practice is to render as much as I can from my head, THEN use photo reference, and THEN go back to my head.)

So I hope you enjoy this monday surprise. Plan on at least seeing the 3 birds poster by the end of the week. Based on how much effort and time it took to completely render my big-small illustration up above, it might take longer to complete my mermaid one...oh and I should mention that this week my Ceramics class ends...so I have those deadlines as well. See ya!