it's not a revelation, no, just our ritual

[title taken from the intermission transcripts]

So i thought it might be interesting to show you the process how i landed on this particular concept, because it was a process. I'm not going to do lengthy posts for the other three, but this once, i think it's fine. A4 is a gigantic paper size for me to work on and i think i still did a decent job.

So, the only guide i had was the theme of the piece: "Vessel's masks through time." Which is as vague and broad as is specific. There were a lot of ways to go about it and i only brushed a few of them.

These were the very first sketches i made, merely minutes after i got the prompt, but they obviously just weren't there:

As sketches go, they weren't bad per se, but keep in mind that the Arcadia mask being a completely different colour scheme. It throws off the balance, so after hating all three of those, i went back to 3x4 cm thumbnail drawings. Best size to figure out general layout on a page btw and i still utilize it less than i should.

This was the point were the brain fog started to clear up a bit. I needed an asymmetric composition, with the Arcadia mask somehow separated or highlighted, and i also started to toy with the idea of adding Vessel.

So i did a preliminary sketch of the two i liked more:

I still wasn't fully on board with either concept. I loved the spiral as a timeline, but it was too empty, and i liked Vessel on the other one but hated the clear cut divide of "here is vessel, and then here are his masks." Not a good composition.

At the end i merged the two ideas. I put Vessel in the centre, slapped the Arcadia mask on him, solving the separation issue. Also wanted to keep the timeline of the spiral so i put the Eden mask into his hand. For the rest of the masks i have made little placeholder cutouts to move them around to find their final placement. When i was feeling good about it, i finalised an A6 sized sketch.

Once done, i scaled it up using the ancient art of scanning the sketch, opening it on a large enough monitor and tracing it onto an A4 paper. And this was the result:

And the rest of it was merely finishing it, so have some progress pictures:

And have the coloured version here as well. I was not planning on putting it here, because i am much more fond of the raw pencils. Also leaving the coloured ones as artbook only could have been neat, but alas, resolution problems and all that, so here it is: