Fire and Ink

I'll write up more about the process in another post later but yeah. I thought about shading him more but then thought, as it is, he looks a bit like marble and that fits the art of the time.

The gold . . . I'll maybe throw a video up in the process post because video gets closer to capturing what it really looks like.

I mentioned doing this with his beard in an earlier post, but I really recently started using tracing paper to plan design stuff over the base drawing I have done so far so that I can save the paper the frankly massive amount of erasing that happens when I design. :) A lot of time today was spent getting this basic shape down for Medusa's snakes.

Once that was done I took what I had drawn on the tracing paper which looked like this:

And moved it beneath the base image and used my light pad to draw the snakes onto the actual drawing. I used a gray fine-liner as well as the black XS that I've been using the whole time to work on the snakes and that was a moment . . .and a lot of questioning every decision I've ever made in my life that led me to thinking drawing this was a good idea. I always hit that point somewhere in a drawing and for this one, it was the snake detail.

But I persevered:

After that it was a lot of time just getting the basic outlines of the rest of the motifs down and adjusting some of his cloak and such to be a little more photo accurate and that's what's all in the WIP pic that started all of this.

I've definitely been learning a lot about design and the way that I approach things. I want Medusa to be a little lighter and more ethereal than Acacius and the next step for me is to grab another piece of tracing paper and throw it over this base and work on a value sketch and see where I want to make dark and where I want to keep light before I commit to whatever I end up deciding. The concept of a value sketch is something I learned recently as well in an illustration course on Domestika and I feel like it's going to be a gamechanger for me.

I knew I was a goner for this character with the first image release I saw, which was him in that Medusa armor. I love Medusa. She's an important figure in my life. I've been working on the tracing paper over this to start to add her design in: