The Process of Reflection

While moving a bunch of old files to my new laptop the other night, I stumbled upon the pages from my college process book. In Senior year in my Illustration Portfolio class, all Art-Illustration majors needed to create a process book to go along with their portfolio. The process book contains the brainstorming and sketches that led up to the final pieces of art in the portfolio. These pages from the process book relate to an assignment on reflection. I had to paint a watercolor piece built around a reflective object. For this assignment, I started by making a list of reflective surfaces (you can see it below, I apologize if you can’t read my handwriting). From there, I drew a series of thumbnail sketches incorporating the reflective items. The ones that are starred were the ideas I decided to expand on (you can click on the process book page, to view a larger version of the image).

Process Book: Page 1

Below you can see the next round of sketches, these were a bit more refined. It became clear fairly quickly that the image with the knife was the strongest. In the first sketch, the victim is a woman, but I thought a man getting stabbed offered more narrative appeal. Plus if I had a woman getting stabbed by a guy, when I could do the reverse, I felt like I’d be disappointing Joss Whedon. I then started sketching various possible poses for the victim.

Process Book: Page 2

Below on the third page of sketches, I’ve decided on the position of the victim and refined the image of the knife. Apparently, I was feeling extra ‘sketchy’ while working on this project, because I even drew a floor plan for how I would shoot the reference photos.

Process Book: Page 3

Normally, I don’t do a final sketch that is this detailed. On this occasion, because there were multiple elements in multiple reference photos and erasing on watercolor paper doesn’t go well, I decided to draw what amounts to a fully-realized pen-and-ink piece first. I then took the pen-and-ink piece and projected that image onto the watercolor paper. If you’re wondering why the victim in the piece went from a young man in the sketches to an old man in this final sketch, I was basing the original sketches around using my best friend for reference and he totally flaked on me when I needed to shoot the photos. My grandfather, thankfully, was awesome enough to step in and pose for me. I actually think using an older man as the victim adds more to the story. It creates more possible scenarios for who stabbed him and why.

Process Book: Page 4

And now here’s the final watercolor painting:

Final watercolor painting

Blog-A-Day Challenge: Day 25

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