Down at Fraggle Rock!

So. In case you couldn't tell by the extremely not-subtle clue I left at the end of my last post, I've been working on something related to the old Jim Henson Company show Fraggle Rock. I found out about the contest when I revisited the Talenthouse website (the company I did the Florence + the Machine project through), and even though I promised myself I would stop doing these kind of things, I couldn't help it. I mean c'mon. Muppets. Jim Henson. I had to.

Basically, the point is to design a piece of artwork for Fraggle Rock's 30th Anniversary; if you are selected as the winner you get prize money, a tour of the Jim Henson Co., and your artwork becomes official Fraggle Rock merch. As much of a longshot as it is, good things could definitely come from it -- even if I'm not chosen as the winner. I mean, I get a cool new portfolio piece and my artwork gets seen by someone at the Jim Henson Company. No complaints here.

My basic idea was to fit as much as I could into the piece without overloading the image with information. There are three main races in Fraggle Rock, the Fraggles, the Doozers, and the Gorgs. The Fraggles and Doozers coexist together in the caves and underground tunnels of Fraggle Rock, whereas the Gorgs live above ground and proclaim themselves to be rulers of the universe. I wanted to illustrate a snapshot of a day in the life of Fraggle Rock, showcasing the symbiotic relationship of the care-free Fraggles and hard-working Doozers, as well as the Gorg's discovery of this ecosystem that has developed right under their noses.

I sketched out a couple of concepts to further realize this idea. As indicated in the top thumbnail, I was thinking of having the piece framed by a Doozer-built structure, but I thought that was drawing too much attention away from the Fraggles. I thought it would be better compositionally to have the Doozers working on a structure in the middle-ground to create a greater sense of depth to the cave.

Since the characters were layered on top of one another in my sketch to create an illusion of depth, I thought it would make it easier to draw each of them individually, and then combine them in photoshop so I could play around with position and scale much easier. I was planning on using watercolors for the piece, but I realized my watercoloring skills were pretty rusty while working on the initial washes to create the rocky texture, so I colored the figures with Prismacolor markers and colored pencils for highlights. It was also at this point that I decided to do away with the Doozer structure all together (in fear of the piece looking too clunky and crowded) and instead have a couple spare Doozers spread out throughout the image.

And...voila! After scanning it into photoshop, I created some cool-colored shadowy areas to help differentiate between the layers of the cave and fixed the eyes of the characters since they didn't come out as I wanted them to in the drawing. As always, thoughts and critiques are much appreciated. Voting ends on August 21st at 10 a.m., so if you like it and want to vote, you can do so here. It's the same as the Florence contest, you vote through Facebook or Twitter (or both if you have both).

Anyway, now that I have contest-ing out of my system (though I was almost tempted by this upcoming Pendleton Ward-judged Adventure Time t-shirt design contest THAT BRENDAN REGULINSKI SHOULD TOTALLY DO SOMETHING FOR...HINT, HINT), my website is my main focus. The end of summer is nigh, therefore I must get cracking if I want to have the update completed by then. Fingers crossed!

Enter: THE PHOENIX!

As I mentioned in the last post, I have a few projects I've been working on both for myself and for a couple contests (not unlike the previous Florence + the Machine album cover contest, but hopefully with better results).

This is my entry for the first of the two contests I am submitting stuff for within the next few weeks. The contest is through a website called We Love Fine, and the guidelines were to create a t-shirt design using villains from Marvel Comics (there was a specified list of 100 you had to choose from). The winner gets prize money and their design is used as official Marvel merchandise.

The character I choose is Dark Phoenix, ripped straight from the pages of my favorite comic series -- X-Men. Long story short, the Phoenix is an intergalactic being that possesses the body of Jean Grey, a telekinetic telepath, turning her into an insanely unstable planet-destroying entity of near-unrivaled power.

One of my main goals was to make her look a little gaunt, creepy, and dangerous to emphasize the character's ruthless/villainous nature and play down the spine-breakingly 'sexy' poses a lot of artists like to depict her in. The Phoenix formed by Jean's fire-y hair is an attempt to show the a more direct union of the two rather than Jean being enveloped in a giant flaming bird like in the comics.

The contest voting was supposed to go live on July 6th, but then it got pushed back to the 10th, then today, and now it's been pushed back again to the 19th. I was going to post this to coincide with the start of voting...but it's moved around so much, I figured I would just post it now and let you guys know when it goes up for real. You can visit this link to view my entry on the site.

As for the next contest I'm working on, I'm just gonna tease you with this:

Only If For a Night

Whilst casually perusing these fair interwebs about a few weeks ago, I stumbled across a design contest. The gist of the contest is as follows:

Design artwork based on a single off the album of one of the following artists/bands: Ben Howard, Bombay Bicycle Club, DJ Shadow, The Cure, Noah and the Whale, CSS, and Florence + the Machine. The designs chosen by the band, or voted amongst the 5 highest by the general public, will be printed on an 7" album sleeve, displayed in a record shop in London, and sold...with all of the proceeds going to the Teenage Cancer Trust. There's no monetary compensation for the designers, just exposure and the feeling that you've helped an awesome cause.

The second I saw the words 'create artwork' and 'Florence + the Machine', I was sold. The fact that is was for a charity that helps teenage cancer patients only sweetened the deal. Florence's song "Only If For a Night" is the single they selected as the basis for the design.

One of the most appealing factors of Florence Welch's music is that it has such an elegant and ethereal feel to it. As lame as it sounds, one of the best representations of the visual imagery I get from her music is the design of Lady Galadriel and her city of Lothlorien from the Lord of the Rings movies. To me, the mixture of unearthly mysticism and the heavily Art Nouveau-inspired sensibilities -- in both dress and architecture -- are an apt summation of the image and sound Florence exudes. When creating my design, I knew that these were things that I definitely wanted to work into my piece.

The sketch in the upper left-hand corner was the first idea I came up with: a central image of Florence in front of delicately patterned framework -- some manner of portal between real life and the dreamy milieu of her music. The thumbnail included the phases of the moon going around the center circle, but I left those out of the final piece due to time constraints. I also changed the color scheme and pose of Florence for the finished piece in order to match the more somber and reverent tone of the song.

The head on the right is a failed attempt at my second idea: doing a straight portrait. I didn't really consult my reference image while rendering, so whatever likeness the base drawing had to Florence was lost. This influenced my decision to make it a more stylized likeness, that way I could spend less time on worrying how 100% accurate it was and spend more time on the drawing as a whole.

Anyway, this is the finished piece. I do wish I had a little more time (since I was working on it up till 20 minutes before it was due), but I am pretty happy with how it turned out. Voting on the artwork doesn't end until noon to 1ish on January 26th (this Thursday!), so if you haven't voted and want to, then click right here. As Christina discovered, if you have a Facebook and a Twitter, you can vote using both a.k.a. vote twice because you love me. :D