IF- Teacher

On my way to wok I was thinking of an idea for an illustration...a teacher popped into my mind. I thought to brush it off until I found out that Illustration Friday's topic was "TEACHER" haha! So i hope you enjoy.

Thanks to Dan dos Santos and his recent posts over at Muddy Colors (link available at bottom of post) I made a HUGE breakthrough in one one of my greatest weaknesses...Value and color structure.  To be quite specific it is structure in complex environment based illustrations...for example if you look at the portrait below I find those type of things easy because it has only 2 layers of depth: Foreground and Background. The trouble occurs when I add a third layer Foreground, Middleground, and Background.  I tend to lose control of the illustration's structure.

Which is why I found Dan dos Santos post so helpful. He summarized value and color structure in 3 basic degrees or steps that all illustrations can be built off of. Some illustrators (such as Andrew Loomis) have more.  The 3 degrees or steps for each are as follows...

VALUE: White, Grey, Black. 

COLOR: Warm, Neutral, COOL.  

You use one per each of the depth layers (Foreground, Middleground, and background). I can't say I've mastered any of these to my satisfaction, but I feel much more confident in designing a complex composition. See my thumbnails, color palette and 3 degrees for value and color  below:

Oh yah...this past week something special happened...

You guessed it...I doubled the amount of kids I have!

Isn't he a keeper?

Dan dos Santos @ Muddy Colors:

Value Structure : http://muddycolors.blogspot.com/2012/08/composition-basics-value-structure.html

Temperature Structure (COLOR) : http://muddycolors.blogspot.com/2012/08/composition-basics-temperature-structure.html