I've been on a hiatus from social media and posting in general lately. Questioning the point of it all, not in a defeatist way but how and why am I using each site. Which is why I'm writing this here, and not as part of an instagram post.
But anyway, getting back on the train with the 'making of' this image. It was completed as part of a series for CNBSafe, workplace health and safety speakers. CNBSafe present at workplaces on the consequences of workplace accidents from a lived experience.
This one shows the main 'protagonist', James Wood, as a young man before his paralysing workplace accident, and today.
So most of these illustrations were given general prompts to get started, and mostly I was given free reign. I start with a rough sketch to start thinking about placement and composition.
Once that's done I'll usually clean it up a bit before I send it to the client for approval before i go ahead.
Then I get reference material- in this case a photo of James as a young man, and, more recently.
You can see I've used the 'now' pose for direct reference of clothing and pose which is super helpful. The more i draw from reference the better i get at faking it from imagination.
Then I'm thinking about colour, and in this case a general environment to place the characters.
From there it's really just working down to finer details.
This is the final stage where I'm doing colour balances, adding filters, in this case adding some gaussian blur to create a sense of focal distance.
Now as often happens the client will have some ideas right at the very end, in this case to change the younger character to make him a bit younger and in work clothes, and to create a kind of rip between them. I also added a colour gradient to create more contrast between the two halves of the picture.
And that's it! Let me know what you think, hope this is helpful for you.