Really rough sketches playing around with scale and composition.

Block in my silohette and start to sketch.

I wanted ST to have this melancholy feel. He is pondering a flower as he counts the petals off- “she loves me, she loves me not”. I also wanted him to be growing out of the flora that surrounds him.

I anchored him with a root system and put a tree behind him. The tree also helped with the overall composition drawing the eye to the flower. I also began to add leaves, initially I didn’t plan on quite as much foliage as the finished piece contains. The canvas size & shape changed here too. I will change this all the way to the end if I don’t feel like it’s working

This was the finished drawing. Lots more detail than I usually like to put into a drawing. Normally I’m impatient and want to get to the inking & colouring ASAP. I used Sketchbook pro to develop the pencil drawing.

In Sketchbook pro I created a thin to thick ink pen made a new layer and started inking every goddammed line. With hindsight I probably would have inked the whole thing from the beginning and bypassed the sketch. Layers and undo allow us this luxury that ink & paper never would.

The finished ink. As the colouring progresses I do end up adding more black line as I edit & change stuff. At this stage I was pretty sick of drawing roots & leaves. :)

I now switched over to Photoshop and using a “multiply” layer I started to block in my palette. I tend to pull my colour’s from real life, grabbing them from referenced photo’s. In this case it was a couple of photo’s of a louisiana swamp. The palette however is always shifting as I mess with saturation and hue.

Once I’d blocked in my base colour’s I went back and airbrushed the shapes.

At this point I had given everything form using the airbrush. I had also used dodge & burn to create more depth. I wanted to add something to the flora in the foreground as it seemed boring. By burning back some of the shadows I gave it the terrain I was looking for. I then added a skull to be discovered.

The final piece benefited from some saturation & palette adjustments. I was concerned that all that airbrushing was making it more like a painting than a pen & ink illustration, so I made the black ink more prominent. I also added some contour lines to the tree, and a shaft of light. The overall intention was for the observers eyes to keep coming back to the flower and to question what is on poor old Swamp things mind.