This painting will be a part of my Hidden Treasure series. At first, it was nothing more than a drawing practice for me, but it got dragged on for so long that it has now inspired me to make more illustrations with similar treasure-water concepts.
It’s also my first artwork for the year 2015, and I’m particularly proud of this one because I find it to be a good representation of the kind of illustration style that I want to pursue in my original artworks. I’ve still got a long way to go in mastering realism, but my art is finally heading towards a direction that I like; It feels like I’m seeing the light at the end of a very long tunnel, for the first time!
Before I started this illustration, I noticed two things:
- I am fascinated by Japanese Seinen series like Gantz and Shingeki no Kyojin.
- I badly needed to practice drawing anatomy!
So, I conceptualized an illustration where I can both study the human form (female first!) and express my interest in those animes. Fortunately, putting together ideas from those two wasn’t very hard since those series were known for its dark themes and exploration of the human anatomy.
My original idea was a female form where bits and pieces were peeled off her flesh to show the different layers of her anatomy. The head should be the center of attention as it should show everything, layer by layer (skin, muscles, skull, brain). However, I made the mistake of getting carried away drawing the face. By the time I realized it, the face was so polished that I didn’t have the heart to peel her skin off and take out her eyeballs for the sake of showing some skull! So I went along with this new plan to clean her up (no muscle display now) and put the spotlight on her brain instead. I think it worked well; The exposed brain creating a good contrast to her pretty face.
It was also around this point when I decided to add the clown fish and came up with the Hidden Treasure title, which eventually became a series idea.
In the left image (above) the body looked weird. I realized it was mostly because of my drawing which was too sharp-looking. It looked like a 3D model in its ugly stages! I fixed it with the help of Blur tool. I recalled those traditional paintings that I love, and visualized how my illustration would look like, if it was one. After softening the edges, it now looked more natural to me.
I nudged everything downwards as a final edit. I thought it was a necessary sacrifice, since I wanted to take away the attention from the body (goodbye, boobs) and add more negative space without changing the canvas size. This way, it didn’t feel like the subject was dumped at the very center of the image.
2015
More paintings are coming up! Updates and WIP shots will be posted, as usual, on Facebook. 🙂
