She Sings From Somewhere You Can’t See

Refined the sketch of San Francisco A LOT. Changed the pose entirely.

New ideas for this go-round:
Parrots: For the parrots of Telegraph Hill.
Chinese coin tied to her feet.
Portrait of Emperor Norton

For those just joining us, the Character of the Week challenge on ConceptArt.org this week is to illustrate a city as if it was a person.

For now, this is what I’m submitting to EoW, what with the deadline being up this morning. I want to do more with the landscape and castle details eventually.

I really wanted to go with a very vertical layout at first. Tangent: one of my biggest frustrations being only an amateur photographer is that generally getting photos with dramatic vertical scope is pretty hard, but I love that sense of depth and space. Similarly, I find it hard to replicate that in art. So I was really pushing the vertical layout at first.

However, all that gave room for was the castle and the mountain and bits of the path. Meh. I wanted to add more. Hints of a graveyard, perhaps. Gnarled trees. The Carpathian mountains, etc. So I moved to a wider format. I considered framing the vista in a window and having Lucy Westenra sitting on a window seat, staring out at the castle. (Not pictured, since I didn’t end up painting it, but I may still use this idea. I haven’t gone this route because this is Environment of the Week, not Character of the Week, and I worried that such a framing of the castle would turn the focus to the human in the picture.) Instead I decided to balance the composition by placing the ruins of a destroyed church in the lower right.

Also I was unhappy with my bridge, and how that played into the approach to the castle. So I opened up 3dsmax again and redid the bridge formation as well.

This week’s Environment of the Week over at ConceptArt.org is Dracula’s Castle. Anyway, I thought it would be fun to participate. I made the castle part in 3DSMax and after experimenting with views, roughed in two layout ideas I’m torn between. John likes the one on the right better, I’m leaning towards the one on the left.