Snow White maybe?

Sooo there was a competiton on Juxtapoz a little while ago for the new Snow White and the Huntsman movie.  Basically, create a poster promoting the film.  Oh, and you had to make sure the characters did not resemble the actors in the movie (I love image rights).  So I start working on it, only to find out the closing date was in two days.  I knew I wasn't going to finish in time but had been wanting to experiment with ink washes so I decided to do a quick ink wash drawing.  I had my reservations about the quality of the ink drawing but I liked the potential in the composition enough to scan it in and work it to completion in photoshop.  Here is the original drawing:

As you can see, very rough.  I wasn't too fazed, partly because I had used brown paper and knew I would have to tweak the pic a lot.  Sometimes it helps having an average drawn image as a starting point.  It stops you becoming too precious about what you've done and makes it easier to be more open to changing the image and going off in unexpected directions, as you'll see in this pic...

As you can see, it's quite a departure.  I really wanted to emphasize the overall shape of the composition.  It's a simple idea and a simple composition, so the shape had to be really strong to hold it all together.  I still need to finish the figures, which is tricky.  I'm trying not to get too obsessed with detail (the original idea was to use pure silhouettes anyway).  It's at a stage where I'm leaving it for a few days, then working on it a bit, then leaving it.  I find it helps me to spot problems when I view it with fresh eyes and stops me over committing to anything too much.  Even though it is close to completion there is still lots of room for deviation from where it currently is and while it may end up staying close to this, there's no point closing off options.

Hopefully this will be completed in the next few weeks...

Another belated update

Jeez, I'm becoming terrible with this...  For the record I have been working on my figures and hands.  Unfortunately, being involved in a business startup takes a lot of your time.  It's very hard to sit and do sketches of hands at your desk when you're worried about month end and money coming in.  I'm spending so much time on invoices, admin and trying to keep all this shit organized that I'm struggling to balance building my portfolio and improving my skills.

Lately I've been getting more involved with my company website www.twostones.co.za and it's been quite interesting.  We (me and my business partner Chris) spent a long time initially uploading images, setting up pages and galleries and just basically trying to make a presentable website.  But as we've moved along and gotten more comfortable about getting a certain amount of work per month our focus has shifted to getting more work (we're surviving month to month but it's not like we're living the dream).  So we're moving into marketing ourselves seriously now.  Personally, I think starting a business involves surviving (whichever way you can) while setting up maintainable business systems that will help your business grow.  That means getting all the admin organized (our hope is to get a database system to handle much of this for us) and setting up marketing strategies and implementing them (in our case cold calls, e-mail lists and our website).  We're getting the cold calls organized (albeit slowly, mainly because who likes cold calling?) and slowly building mail lists.  But our website and social media is going to be very important.  Facebook seems to be the equivalent of sending out a press release to your friends.  The great thing about it is it is very easy to generate interest in your business amongst your friends and family while directing traffic to your website.  SEO (search engine optimization) plays a big part in it too, Our hope being that if our site is placed well we can get an edge on other design companies and freelancers who use a website but haven't bothered to set it up right.  We'll take any advantage we can get.

On a more artistic note, I recently had a piece accepted for a show in China.  It's a really interesting concept and I'm stoked an image was selected.  A lot of my work in my portfolio is geared towards editorial and children's illustration.  It's quite simple, with flat colours, simple linework and simple cell shading.  I'm very influenced by comics and guys like Frank Stockton and Tomer Hanuka.  And while these pieces are certainly more simplified and don't really resemble their work, I think that comic influence always sort of shines through.  That said, I'm also a huge fan of Dave McKean and Andrew Jones.  I like incorporating textures and unusual effects into my work and the piece that is being displayed in China is very much a digital painting that uses textures and unusual effects (hopefully to good effect).  The piece is titled "Return" and I hope you enjoy it...