A centaur's wrath

After three months of not producing absolutely anything due to my MA program, here is another piece of my work.  

Not only due to my origin, Greek Mythical Creatures, namely centaurs, fauns, minotaurs,sirens always appealed to me, monstrous yet delicate in a way, they consist great themes for illustration. I'll never stop producing different versions of them since it's absolutely exciting for me.

In this case, I used a drawing I had done back in March 2012. It was done almost on one go and last December, I worked more on his left had, his face. So a couple of weeks ago I added his tail, and started researching on the ways I could give the feeling of the furious centaur running in the water. Fortunately by my second attempt I found a satisfying way of depicting it. I used the pump of my old and rusty fountain pen, to spill those ink drops on a piece of paper. The spills were numerous, random varying in size, exactly what I needed. Through photoshop I multiplied them and arranged them according to the needs of the theme and the structure of the image. 

Centaur's body was another issue. The strong black frame of the image somehow imposed me a body basically of no colours or neutral tones. That made the contrast between the figure and the frame stronger and added dramatic intensity to the whole image as black colour, in this form, symbolizes wrath. Wrath that stems from the figure itself. The depth of the its mouth and the spits coming out of it, are black as well. Moreover this colour opposition dictated the hue of the background, that had to be something relatively neutral but which also had to give a level of contrast with the figure. To return to the body, I've tried also to differentiate mildly the hues of  the human part from the ones of animal part. That had to be done carefully, without compromising the unity of this hybrid creature. For this, I added one extra layer of white hue on the human breast and stomach as well as in the belly of the horse body. 

Finally, for the logo, I had to experiment more that the other parts of this composition. An old piece of cloth, somewhere on my desk, fortunately not forgotten, gave me the answer. Unweaving it, I gave the sense of disintegration the wrath brings to the soul. 

the happy hooker

This is my first project in England. The objective was to make sth out of some rough sketches I had done in the past, without spending to much time on it. It took me four days, I think it's fair enough. Although I had in mind an idea of what I wanted it to look like, I lost time going back, designing things from the the scratch, since I realized that I needed them during the procedure and not beforehand.

Once more, in terms of style, this piece is strongly based on its original form in pencil. I mean it is rendered in a way that respects the quality of the pencil line (not precise and sharp). As a result it evokes a retro kind of feeling, that it is so important to me.

Masquerade

Dad

It was only after publishing the previous work, that I felt not that satisfied with the result. I needed sth else to overcome this "accident" lets say. So within two days I came up with the above image. In fact the other day, i saw in the metro a young dad with his baby son, such a lovely image. So I said to myself lets try something like that. And here it is, hope you like it.

The lumberjack

It seems to me, ages since my last publication. In the meantime I've worked on many different things, which will appear here, some time in the future, hopefully.

Now, in this case, I started drawing some lines, without intending to go on with an illustration. And then I said why not? lets give it a shot. I added the forest, the ribbon and the deer (always fond of the deers, hope to craft more of them). Also I wanted to try/test myself in designing a checked shirt (which was very trendy last winter, i believe) so typical of a lumberjack. It was tough, i had to adapt the checked pattern to the drapes of the fabric. Finally I believe it paid off. 

The only thing i used reference for was the deer. Not yet that trained in drawing them accurately enough. On the other had, the lumberjack figure betrays its cartoon origin, means no reference used. 

With this peace it's obvious to me, that my own illustration technique and style is well established in my head. It's a style that respects the pencil origin of the whole thing. On the other hand, I need to try different roads, creatively speaking. Hope so ...

Under attack

The excessive use of color was one of the main objectives of this piece.  But the hardest part was to find a personal sense of rhythm, that would give a kind of meaning to all these different shapes, textures and colors.