People were asking to show my process when making an image, and while getting rid of files I saw I still had some of my sketches from this piece so decided to show this part of the process.
I usually start most of my pieces with traditional pen & ink, exploring the idea in its most basic, broken down to line. Here you can see me exploring different shapes & compositions in line form.Traditional is great in this stage as it forces you to just put ideas down without the ability to undo, this can lead to unexpected results.
I then scanned these in and explore some of my favourites more in digital. First with digital line drawings, which in this case didnt get me much. So instead I started to explore more the shapes in the scene with black & white and then with greyscale. You can even see some simple black shapes at the top for bridge designs I was playing with. I spent alot of time in this one exploring different graphic shape designs and settled on a bridge that looked like a parabolic arch, the perfect arch, actually discovered by the Sassanid Persians but not really explored properly till the 20th century. Since the arch is mathematical perfection I thought it perfect for Tolkiens Elves.
Digital is great here in these later sketches, as you can edit easily like flip things, add or substract from them without any damage etc, which would be impossible traditional and so in this case it would limit what you can achieve. Overall, these kind of exercises are great, breaking everything down its simple lines & shapes, before developing further with form, texture, colour & light etc
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