STC-Later Life- FINAL

Back again. Round 3. After showing the color sketches to the director, he felt that the image was a little too realistic, and as a result had lost some of it's sketchy charm. I had to agree with him. This sometimes happens when you work and rework an image. It gets more detailed and refined, but it also loses some of its energy. The word used was to describe the last round was "clinical". Not what you hope for. So now I have the challenge of pulling back and loosening up the image. The director also felt that he wanted to punch up the humor a bit as the title and the subject matter could lead people to think it could be a bit of a drag. So I also need to "up" the comic eccentricity of the image without losing the romance, or messing up the basic composition. I find that when I get to this point I need to get into a more left-brain kind of mood. Since I have a tendency to gravitate towards careful rendering, I can achieve this by physically warming up, working fast and in a medium that is loose by nature, i.e. paint, as opposed to pen and ink, brush as opposed to pen. It also helps if I have a little bit of wine...























Here is my initial attempt to rework the image in a looser, more cartoony style.























Here is the finished, or I should say, almost finished final artwork. We'll see how the client likes it before I say it is completely finished.























Well, the client ultimately did not like the final artwork, and decided to shoot their own photography to illustrate the play. Although disappointing, it's OK, as I will still be designing the final poster using their image, and I got paid. I still think that the original version (before the addition of the cartoon-ey foreground figures) worked well. Oh well, no one said illustration was easy. For myself, I painted the foreground figures out of the final painting, re-scanned it, and cropped the final image. (This was my favorite part of the image anyway). Here is the final result.