So I had a change of heart.. about a few things! Firstly the mermaid project, I kinda got frustrated with it and had to do a lot more research than I originally planned -which was fine but I wasn't looking for that in a project right now ;)


Long story short, I'm looking a lot more seriously into freelance illustration. Concept art was something I wanted to do mostly because you could get a solid job from it, although the reality is that may not be quite true. (This is completely open by the way, feel free to comment your thoughts and experiences!)


So with that in mind, I'm hoping to build a bit more of an illustration portfolio for now since that's where my head is at and it gives me good focus on where to improve.

You may recognise this fairly recent piece I concepted and illustrated:

And I was super proud of it! For like a week....

I thought my basics were fine, the picture itself wasn't that bad (in my opinion) it just lacked something. So I started messing around with different lighting and it made quite a dramatic difference very quickly.


So here you are! The new white witch illustration!

In the next couple of weeks I hope to do a lot more/a lot different illustrations with lots of improvement so lets see what happens!

So after attempting to re-do this several times I finally did it! I'm generally really pleased with how this turned out (don't know how long that'll last though...) The entire process was actually really straightforwards and I don't think I hated it once, so I thought I'd do a breakdown of how I did it here!

After doing my Sargent studies I had decided that I wanted to paint Jadis as if I were painting her portrait in real life. I thought this would be an interesting way of capturing her personality as well as her design. I started off with some really quick sketches exploring different poses; I knew I wanted her to look powerful but still sassy as hell.

I was struggling for ideas so I turned to existing Royal portraits. I quickly noticed that the women looked reserved while the men looked a little ostentatious; "Look at me look how powerful I am!!!". While the Queens of old didn't need to do this, I felt like Jadis would act like a King, and would want to look like that in her portrait so I changed up some of my poses for her.

With the help of my trusty camera and my inner sass I took some photos of different poses which helped me visualise them a lot easier (plus I really enjoyed it but don't tell). I felt having Jadis holding some kind of weapon really helped give her a strong pose.

With the pose decided it was onto the final! I've come to realise the more I paint that I really benefit from giving myself some good lines to work from. I know some artists work better blocking in the shapes but I always find myself getting lost and frustrated without lines. This way I work out all the problems before I tackle painting.

I whack in the flat colours to give myself a good base and then go straight to the face to avoid intimidating myself (sounds silly I know, but if I try and do a bit all over I kinda get overwhelmed and give up) I noticed a lot of the royal portraits had some kind of deep red drapery or something relatively interesting in the background so I added some into the top corner.


Using my reference as I paint I usually flip my canvas quite often to check for errors.


I then work my way down the painting to block in good details and then jump around adding more where needed. I have a lot of references available, some I use more than others.


And finished! (approx 2 days on and off painting) I used a photo of a sword hilt because I was struggling with design as well as rendering to the standard I wanted as well as a texture pattern for the dress to make it look more interesting! I do feel like the Sargent studies I did helped this painting which is always a good sign!

Now that I've done the two Jadis versions to a level I'm happy with I hope to tackle more Narnia creatures and characters! What would you like to see me re-design?

In order to take a break from the Jadis repaint I was doing (which I'm now probably going to scrap because I want to do it EVEN BETTER) I decided to finally get around to concepting her White Witch 'look'.

I find the world of Narnia incredibly fascinating, and I'm also a big fan of the film adaptations and the kind of Medieval England style they took on although I never did like Jadis' costumes (loved the acting though!).

A glammed up Vogue Queen Jadis

Reading the books again and re-imagining Jadis pre-Narnia with a completely different cultural approach to her design was really fun and almost liberating(?) to make her something other than a white woman.

Now back to my version; I was well aware that in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe that Jadis is described as having white skin, which kinda contradicts my brown-skinned pre-Narnia Queen concept. I figured I'd have to do something different with her skin and still keep it believable- I'll cover that later.

First idea iteration

I started with a large moodboard of visual references and made some really sketchy silhouettes; I was trying to go the 'right and proper' way of concepting, as I feel like my concepting (for somebody who wants to be a CONCEPT ARTIST) isn't as strong as it should be (I do two or three ideas and then go 'I like that one!' and cease concepting).

After the first four scribbles I actually started to churn out some interesting ideas (number one- Maleficent anyone?!) I wasn't sure whether to have her immune to the cold or not as it would be quite restricting to some of the big elegant dresses I had in mind or just completely unrealistic so I did a bit of both.

One of the things I also tried to bear in mind when I was doing these was the different poses/gestures I gave her. Although she's a pretty evil/badass/strong/powerful character there were a lot of different ways of portraying that. Some turning out a little sassier than the others..

Unfortunately I had such a solid vision of her face I neglected to do any alternatives. For these I decided to use photobashing (which I rarely do) to conjure up a realistic face based on what I had in mind (sketching what I have in mind results in quite a stylised drawing which I didn't want).

Now! Back to what I mentioned with her skin! How do you make a dark skinned character suddenly have white skin? The answer? Magic!

In a world where a witch can plunge it into an eternal winter I decided it wouldn't be too extreme for the witch's skin to completely drain of the beautiful rich colour she originally had! The faces are a work in progress currently as I'm still trying to get to grasps with painting over the greyscale version and also getting her skin to look the way I want it to.

Overall I'm really enjoying this project so far! I have so many thoughts and idea processes behind Queen Jadis' design that I figured I'd compile it into a blog post.

Any thoughts on the direction its going or suggestions for other cool projects would be much appreciated! Thanks for reading!

 

I've been working on getting a good 9-5 routine now that I'm working at home. My mornings are usually dedicated to studies and freelance(?) art- I don't really feel that I can call it freelance cause I'm not earning any money from it yet...

But my afternoons are being dedicated to what I'm naming 'portfolio work'. Which means I'm finally trying to take doing a portfolio seriously! I think the reason I haven't put together a good portfolio yet is because I still haven't got to the stage where I feel like I'm good enough to 'show off' my work. As well as this a large body of my work that I upload is literally studies and copies of photographs, and there's no point putting those in a portfolio!

To save the pressure of starting something new and from scratch I decided to repaint my final Queen Jadis concept, since I've always really liked the design but the more I look at it the more I hate the execution.

Queen Jadis original concept

Preview of my new concept illustration.

 I decided to work the pose a lot more to give her more of a powerful presence (as she is actually a force to be reckoned with, especially when she's in her home world of Charn. I'm also working into the details way more than I usually do, partly because its 'portfolio work' and partly because I think I need to spend more time and effort on my paintings because its clearly paying off!

I also gave her a bit of a change of colour in her dress, the royal blue and red just looked to typical and boring!

What do you think? Do you prefer the first version or is repainting it a good call? Are there any other paintings of mine you'd like me to repaint? Let me know in the comments!