The Office Strikes Back -WIP 4-28-10

This week, instead of just another progress shot of the whole poster, I thought I'd take snapshots of my progress as I completed Creed. It's always interesting for me to look back and see hoe things evolve and take shape, so I thought it might be interesting for others to see as well.

My favorite part of the process is once a character is pretty much done and it just needs some fiddling and tweaks here and there to perfect the likeness or make the values pop. I enjoy meticulously combing over the drawing and making brush strokes that are mostly imperceptible. My least favorite part, by far, is starting a new person's portrait. Every time, even though I've finished five of them now, there's a moment of terror where I'm sure I won't be able to do it again. It's intimidating starting again from scratch with a blank shape that needs to be molded into a realistic depiction. I'm trying to remedy this by forcing myself to work faster and more boldly as to not allow too much doubt to creep in. Better to just slap some paint down in broad strokes and keep up the pace then being nervous and allowing myself to procrastinate.

It's worked pretty well thus far, Creed came together rather quickly. I may make another pass over him tomorrow with fresh eyes, but I'm fairly content with how he looks now.

So the first frame is the quick, rough pass just to get an idea of placement of features and general idea of the broad values. The next is where details start to take shape. It's important to get the facial features honed in accurately early on or it'll be a pain to fix later, and even though I tried to consider this, I still had some issues and things needed to be slid around or squished and stretched a bit, as you can see in the jump to the third and to the fourth frame. At the third frame, this is the point where I start to relax and am confident things will turn out okay. And the last frames are mostly just sweetening, by sharpening details and increasing contrast in places and what not. I didn't capture any progress on the suit, unfortunately, as I did it rather quickly one evening and didn't think to pause and snap a pic.

So one more down. Even if this might not be interesting to most people, I think I'll be grateful that I have this graphic, regarding my fear of starting new people, to easily remind me how rudimentary these all once began and what they can become.