Back when I was but a mere speck of darkness in all the light, I bought a copy of 'The Hobbit' through book club in school.. I already loved the animated version of 'The Lord of the Rings', and was a flag waving, HEAVY METAL listening, Dungeons and Dragons playing fatty.. (and I'm still proud if it!)
Anyways.. the cover of the Hobbit was what drew me to the book.. an illustrated piece of Smaug (the Dragon) curled up on a bed of golden treasure.. it really helped to inform my imagination of how the story 'looked' as I read it.. So finally... after what seems like a million years... here's my (Children's Book?) interpretation of the cover..
Flippin' heck.. that was a long post!
Here's a little insight into how my drawings tend to develop.. from the initial sketch (posted earlier) I work up a vector layout in Illustrator. This then allows me to play about with the colours. I generally have a 'vision' of how I want the colours to sit on an image, but Illustrator's flexibility allows me to experiment 'on the go' as it were.. You can see how the colours have changed slightly from the middle image to the framed image. I'll put together the soldiers colleagues from the sketch when I get a minute, but in the meantime I've placed him in a composite environment to give him a sense of belonging... he's so lonely on his own!!
