The Alchemist: In the Desert

So I’ve got another Background Painting class thing to ramble about.  Two, actually, but I’m going to write about them separately.

So for our more major project, I illustrated one of the scenes in the desert where the Alchemist sends away his falcon to hunt before he speaks to Santiago about the trip.

There’s still a few things I need to do to touch it up, but this is pretty much how it’s going to be for now.

Before the sketch that I built on to do my final, I had a couple other variants that didn’t tell the story as well.  Our focus for this project was supposed to be style.  I got a bit of the style aspect (I was working with Aztec stuff and N. C. Wyeth), but the majority of the class was having issues applying it to the degree the teacher wanted (myself included, woo).  There are parts, however, that I was really happy with.

The Alchemist : Desert : Sketch

The tonal, like previous, was done in markers and touched up digitally.  I reworked the dunes in the background so they weren’t going to parallel the blocky nature of the clouds.  In turn, this also helped to better define the actual ground plane and the way the dunes met.

The Alchemist : Desert : Rough Tonal

Next was color keys.  Each one had parts that I liked, but I decided in the end to combine elements of each for the final image.  Having the sky be pink/red/orange seemed like an interesting challenge, so I went with that as the basis for the colors.

The Alchemist : Desert : Color keys

From there, I went and lightened the Alchemist and his falcon in the background and added more instances of the plants so that it wasn’t just a singular thing in the foreground.  So, still have a bit more work to do.   But really not much else to go through, heh.  Most of it is just subtle color shifting anyway.  I have it in my notes at least.