After getting the background more or less in place I started working on the Sam and Dean figures. I blocked in the basic colors first, for the skin, hair, and clothes.
There is only a bare minimum of shading on their faces and hair. I played around with different colors for their clothes. The hardest part was coming up with two different blues for their jeans that still looked fairly authentic.
Once I found a set of colors that seemed to work well together I started adding a little texture to Dean’s jacket. I didn’t exactly try to make it seem like his leather jacket, just a regular jacket, a little beat up looking.
For Sam’s shirt I decided to try my hand at drawing a plaid pattern. Since so little of it was showing I thought it wouldn’t be too hard. I drew a set of pink, blue and dark grey lines in different widths. I put them in diagonally in what would be the button band of his shirt to give it a little more interest. It all came out a bit wobbly, but given the scale at which they’ll be perceived it’s okay. I’m just noticing now that the blue lines in the shirt tail are awfully faint and actually seem to disappear in the later versions. I’ll have to go back and make those a little darker.
The next shot shows that I went back to playing with background again. I added a texture layer to the whole image and then erased or softened it over the figures. This darkens the whole picture and makes it look more atmospheric.
In this next step I added a circular gradient effect from transparent in the middle to a dark blue at the edges.
This darkens everything again significantly. It pretty much obscures much of the red in the sky and makes the background look kind of foggy. I’m not sure if I should back off from this last step. It could also depend on how my author places the scene in her story. If it’s early morning or sunset, I could leave the earlier version, if in the dead of night, the later one.
That’s where this piece stands right now. I still have finishing touches to do. I want to add more shading and highlights on their figures and faces, but hopefully that should be pretty easy to do.
I would like to produce some more illustrations for the story once I know a little more about it. In my next post I’ll put up some doodlings I did with the barest tidbits of information about the story. 🙂
SPN Reversebang
Katsuyakaiba69 picked my prompt and we spent several fun weeks having a great time working together. I was very lucky to be chosen by this very talented writer. Please go and read her wonderfully thought provoking story “Into the Land of Nod” here.
Illustrating an early scene….
“Sam? Sam!” The curdling cold in his belly began to spread through his veins. “Where are you?”
Art, Supernaturally 