This was the piece I did for our emulation project. I started out wanting to emulate Alex Ross when we started this project. I got a friend to come take some photos of me in "heroic" poses for a reference to draw from like Ross does with so much of his work.
I got a great photo to work from and got cracking on the drawing itself. Once I finished drawing myself the way I actually look in the picture I started to exaggerate my features. I looked at comics I own as well as some drawing muscle studies on deviant art to use as references.
When it came to inking and color I realized I was not going to be able to emulate Ross's realism so I decided to make my emulation of both Ross and Frank Miller's Sin City style. Frank Miller's Sin City was black and white with hints of color here and there and focused on making the images with a lot of play on positive and negative space to get definition.
I felt that I needed to do more than just black and white because the black may have overwhelmed the white and the viewer would lose the figure. In the critique some people thought I could have gotten away with it so I may take it into Photoshop and try it out to see how it looks.
The worst part of the drawing is the fact that the markers I used were very streaky and I felt that it was really distracting to the viewer. In the critique people said it wasn't as bad as I thought but that if it really bothered me I should fix it in Photoshop.
Overall I am very satisfied with the turnout of the piece. I feel it was a successful blend of Ross and Miller's styles. The pose looks typical of a Green Lantern drawing by Ross or many other artists for that matter. And the way it was colored feels like a good emulation of Miller's Sin City. Maybe a touch of green would enhance this, but I really like it black, white, and gray.
Sic Vis Pacem, Para Bellum. Latin for "If you wish for peace, prepare for war." This is the piece that was voted for to go into the end of the year show. I like this piece a lot because of how simple it is. The idea came to me when I saw a typographic design that had a magnifying glass enlarging a couple letters of a word in the design. I already knew I wanted to do something with the Latin phrase and I decided having Peace in the cross hairs of a gun sight would be a perfect way to convey the message and keep the design as simple as the phrase.
I didn't get a lot of feedback on this design because of the nature of the first critique and probably the fact that the one I brought to that crit wasn't to scale. I got a couple of nice comments on it like it was a very intelligent depiction.
I hope that it is well received at the show and at the final critique on Tuesday.
This is my final piece for the class. I like this piece a lot but feel that it needs a different background. I had imagined it in my mind as having a background that looked like a cross section of the rabbit hole Alice tumbled down in Alice in Wonderland. I want to continue to work on this one until I achieve the look I imagined in my mind.
I don't know what else to say about this piece since I didn't really get any comments on it. Maybe people didn't care for it, but that's fine cause I like it and I'm satisfied with the turnout.
