Then & Now (Volume 2)

About a year ago, I contributed to an art book on kickstarter called Then & Now.  The editors picked a number of illustrators and asked us to find old drawings from childhood to redraw now that we are professionals.

As with last year, I went to my high school sketch book (I was approximately 15 or 16 when I had this one) and plucked out two random character pages.

I have many, many pages like this in my sketchbooks from high school: random characters with no larger story attached to them.  Often, the type of character I was drawing reflects the type of art I was looking at that moment.  These are on opposite ends of the book, but they feel as though they are strongly influenced by the Brian Froud/Kieth Parkinson art books I had at the time (with just a splattering of manga).

As I redid them, I wanted to build them into a larger visual story.  Much of my work now focuses on environment as much as character, and I wanted to reflect that storytelling in my redraw.

Here are my thumbs!  Those those silly creatures never made the final elf drawing, and I ended up winging the composition for that one.

Here are my thumbs!  Those those silly creatures never made the final elf drawing, and I ended up winging the composition for that one.

This is the analog image for that sorceress, done in red and black ink/colored pencil on Bee Stipple paper.  All I can say is she loves fish spirits.  I wanted to push my color separation technique in these images, and rendered gradation is tough to separate.  

TN-Sorceress.jpg

But I think it turned out okay!  

Next up was that warrior elf.  I really did up the background in this.  I even added in some statues that appear in my Microcosmics universe, so I suppose I need to fold her into the canon of that series, now.

I couldn't decide on the color scheme.  So I took to facebook and they went with the pink option.

TN-Warrior-pink.jpg

Below is the green option and the mock up for a risograph I plan on taking to MICE this fall.

There are 20 years between those high school drawings and these images.  Remember guys: keep drawing!