Monday, May 17, 2010

Illustration Friday - Equipment

Earlier in the week I had been drawing some rabbit characters, so when I found out the word for this week's Illustration Friday challenge, which this week is 'Equipment,' I decided I would incorporate one of these characters into my drawing.  One of the characters that I drew was an old female rabbit character who is using a walker.  She was inspired by my late mom and my first idea was to do something using this character, showing all of the equipment necessary to make an older person's life easier. But when it came to how I would set up this scene I was at a loss for inspiration.

Instead, I decided to do something inspired by my late father who was a plant pathologist.  He had a laboratory filled with all sorts of scientific equipment which I thought would be a perfect setting for this challenge.  I made his laboratory underground, which seemed natural for a rabbit scientist and I gave him equipment that was a little more on the "mad scientist" side of things, rather than the beakers and centrifuges that my father used. I thought of my rabbit as a scientist who is trying to create the perfect carrot and needs a lot of scientific equipment to do so.

I've included my page of rabbit characters that I was working on prior to this week's IF drawing.  You can see the old female rabbit character in the upper left.  I like her quite a bit so I will try and find a setting for her in a future drawing.  I think you can probably spot the character that I ended up using as my scientist.

I've also included my original digital pencil sketch and two in progress shots so that you can see the image in different stages of development.  I had orignally thought of doing this image completely in pen and ink, but as I began working, I began to envision it with a simply colored background.  I tried to go for the style of a 1950's or 1960's animated cartoon, where the line work is fairly sketchy and the color is made up of blocked shapes that don't always stay within their outlines. I started out making the colors fairly dark, but then decided I wanted to emphasize the pen lines, so in the final image, I dialed back the opacity of the layer that contained the painted color shapes. You can see in the final image that I also decided to put my scientist in a lab coat and gave him a giant carrot to hold.

13 comments:

  1. this is a fantastic post- I love seeing the progression of a sketch. Awesome!!!

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  2. ooooo, nice, I like this one a lot Vincent

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  3. Excellent work! You've got great depth into this...I really love it :)

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  4. love this illustration, your rabbits are gorgeous, i definitely would like to have a mad rabbit scientist friend living in my garden:)

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  5. nice one, vince!...I love seeing the progression and thought process behind this illustration. I love all the details in the background. great stuff!

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  6. This is so beautiful Vincent!I love the linework and I think adding the colour was just the right idea!

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  7. I really like how you show your progression of your illustration. It is a great design.

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  8. Yup yup yup! Great retro feel here! He's an adorable rabbit. And obviously whip-smart for making a humongous carrot. Love the linework in the background!

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  9. Haha.. this is great! I love how you 'set up the scene'.

    It's also really nice to see the work in progress.

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  10. that's super cute, thanks for sharing your story to go with it!

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  11. Fantastic post and illustration!Love the style and your rabbits are awesome!

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  12. How did I miss seeing this one? This piece is genius! What a vision you have!

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