Workshop 5 - Development and Outcomes

For this project I was given a witch that I could find very little information on and no visual references at all so I had to use a bit of imagination based on what I found to create this portrait.

I read that some of the accused witches used animals to carry out their spells and curses and that the devil sometimes appeared to them in the form of an animal. Based on this information I came up with the idea of using animals in my illustration to tell a bit of a story with this vague character. This is the image I made during the day of the workshop it is a collage of different papers painted over with inks which is very different from the way I usually work but I wanted to try something new during the workshop.

 To develop this project I wanted to rework my portrait into something a bit closer to my usual style and materials I use and create a cleaner more developed image. I thought about creating a full page illustration instead of just a a5 portrait because portraits are something I don't usually like to do but I decided to stick with it to be more of a challenge. I redrew the portrait and added the shadow of a bear behind him to make it look like his character could turn into a bear to do his witchcraft.

I then painted over the pencil drawing to create a coloured portrait. I liked this outcome but thought there was a bit too much negative space that I could work with and that the bear didn't look sinister enough to fit the story.

I developed the character again to a have a larger darker looking shadow bear behind him more like in my first outcome I did in the workshop and added in some rain pattern in the background.

I then scanned this image in and worked on it in photoshop to create this final outcome. I think it combines the best bits of both other illustrations I did.