My final image for the Hound of the Baskervilles. SPOILER COMING FOR THOSE THAT HAVE NOT READ THE BOOK!! I was unaware when I did this scene that it was the butler that was the murderer. I captured the menace and secrecy quite well I find. This one is done on a mixed media board with acrylics and watercolor, and then I have enhanced it in photoshop. Oh, and I would love some critique from anyone!

Here is my first finished piece from the The Glass Menageries. I already explained the background of the image previously so I will just shortly explain my technique. I am totally new working with mixed media, but its been really enjoyable so far. I first did a pencil drawing on board, worked over that with bleach titanium layers on layers, added ink and watercolor. Then I scanned it in and add more layers and colors in Photoshop. There is something cool in the rough value sketch that I lost, but I'm pretty pleased with the final painting. Any feedback is welcome!

Really fun process, I love having the drawing to work on. I've always worked with watercolors, and they really don't work on pencil. Using this process I can keep all the charm of the pencil drawing, but still take it further. I'm looking forward to trying your process from the Proko demo. It's a shame you didn't have time to finish it, I would have loved to see the whole process.

I thought it would be more logical to post under Major Assignment 3, but since others have posted here I will do it too. I have been working with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The scene from the book is when the lawyer is hiding, waiting for Hyde to appear so that he can confront him. My opposing themes are Rational vs Primordial (civic vs animalistic). After doing pages and pages of words, reading about the Victorian era, watching the movie, I started to see a interesting idea develop about the morals of the time. People in the middle and rich classes where expected to follow a lot of social rules and dress a certain way. This contrasted Hyde a lot, this ugly, barbaric creature that roamed the streets at night, following his primal instincts and lashing out with anger. I also thought about how people judged each other. The poor where vermin, they where to be blamed for their poverty. All this lead me to the idea of these mannequins in stores, dressed the correct way, looking down at the ugly, hunched creature of Hyde, judging him with a hollow disdain. I found the book particularly difficult to work with, because of very clear opposing theme that already existed in the book. If anything, this book is about opposing themes, and the duality in nature and in us humans. I quickly got an image in my head that was not original, but felt like the right answer to the assignment. A lot of my work was then trying to get rid of that image in my head, and think further and find less obvious answers. I hope that my conceptual idea is clear enough here, and shines through the narrative and the environment. This was the most challenging part of the assignment. I tried to stick with an interior illustration too, because that seemed even more of a challenge. This course is really stretching my mind, I love it!

I chose the theme Reality vs. Escapism/Illusions. The play is set in the 1930s–40s, during the Great Depression and a time of great hardship. I felt that each of the three characters had their own way of escaping from the harsh realities of life: Tom through his poetry and the movies, Laura through her glass collection, and Amanda through memories of her youth as a beautiful young woman. I wanted to explore the contrast between harsh reality and the dreams and illusions they each retreated into. I focused particularly on Tom and was drawn to the theme of reality being represented by factories, chimneys, ladders, rooftops, bricks, and late-night lit windows—while illusions were symbolized by smoke, as a metaphor for lightness, dreaminess, and escape. I didn’t manage to produce three thumbnails that I was completely happy with, but I chose the two strongest ones. I also think that If I took these further I would add more details and icons. I really liked getting going with the words, but I quickly noticed that I deviated from my wordstacks and I also came up with totally different ideas. Is it efficient to work with tangents or ideas that just pop up in ones head? Or will they lose detail and lose connection to a strong theme?

I chose The hound of hound of baskerville and chapter 7 at random. Not much action in the chapter so I worked with what I had. Any suggestions on how I could improve these?

I chose the two minute one to finish, though I like the 30 second one (I like it enough that I didn’t even want to shade it lol)

Great exercise, I will try to remember to do it now and then. Pretty intense though, working with such focus for 2.5 hours. I feel totally drained. I like 30 min and 4 min. Kind of weird how the 2 minute one deviates so much from the others.

It would be "fun" too see how many ways one could tell a story in this image, a bit like the comic 99 Ways to Tell a Story. But just by using light!

I must say the architecture was a bit tricky to understand. I just tried to draw what I saw. I could have darkened my cast shadows a bit. I really like that light values are perceived as dark in relation to lighter values. The dark around the horses in the demo video are perceived as black, even though they are light grey. It almost feels like a trick, because it is not possible to see that way in real life. We always see in full value range.