Process Steez 2: The Steezening

I'm back with the sequel to the process steez. My only fault is that I didn't take enough photos along the way, but you'll just have to live with what I got. Suck it up.

After the initial sketch storm died down I began finalising all the details and getting a better idea of all the elements I wanted to chuck in this thing. As you can see I've also had to deal with one major problem, the fact that this design was going to be printed with white ink on black fabric, so everything I did would have to be the reverse of what I wanted. So I can't just draw something and it's done, it's the areas I leave that will be where the ink goes, which is fricken ANNOYING to say the least. So apart from trying to draw this thing, which is hard enough, I now have to see IN REVERSE. Great.

After trying the dead centre approach with the figure I realised it wasn't dynamic enough, not enough contrapposto going on, art school fools know what's up. So I dug up some more references (ie: naked chics) and worked on the posing to get it more dynamic and interesting, symmetrical is all well and good overall but it can get a bit pretty boring if it feels like I've only drawn one side and just copy and paste. I had to work on the arms too, trying to get a more dynamic, triangular composition overall. I like the idea that the overall flow of ideas in a piece of art or illustration is triangular, it helps the eye travel around continuously. See I know all that theory shit, recognize.

This is not really the next step, as I tend to trace off an image whenever the paper gets all trashed from continuous drawing, so I shoved it in here for good measure. I've got an A3 light box that gets the job done pretty good, much better than taping the damn drawing up to the window like I did before because now I can trace off stuff AT NIGHT instead of relying on the stupid sun. You can see here that the snakes are still pretty lame, I hadn't got around to making them look, y'know, good.

After tracing the image off a million times, it's getting closer to final product. Now that I've got the basic  composition down I can get to work on the details like tightening up the snakes, crow and bones on the altar. I think her boob looks a bit weird too, what was I thinking? I've decided on the idea of using some kind of occult style symbol in the background, I was also playing with notion of having stained glass windows or a cloud of bats, but I ultimately decided that it would be too distracting and/or difficult. The face is almost final by now, but I went through a couple different faces, especially with the lighting. More on that later though, when I finally get inking on this biatch.

Cheers
Roh