Advertising Illustration II #7
(Sorry for the blurry photo)
I think I can safely say that this will be my WORST assignment for this semester. This painting almost killed me. I can't even tell you how many hours I spent on this. I'm at a point where I HATE looking at this illustration.
To start out with, I had pulled an all-nighter to finish the previous illustration for this class, so I really felt like the concepts I brought in for this assignment were weak. Then, my teacher chose this image, which (with all the soldiers) is pretty complex.
Just in the sketch phase it took me like three hours to arrange all of the soldiers and to overlap them and scale them and get the guns in the right place, etc. etc. Then when I brought in the sketch, my teacher hated it. He just flat out said, "This is not how I would have arranged these soldiers" and then proceeded to use tracing paper to show me how I SHOULD have done it. It was too late though. I hit some sort of wall and I just said, "Well, this is how I arranged them and that's how I'M going to paint them!"
So I started painting, and went through layer after layer, trying to get the right values and colors. And each change took a long time to implement because it's also LARGE (14" x 20") and like I said, there are all those damn soldiers. Everyone fell behind on this project and the teacher extended the deadline twice. So I spent THREE WEEKENDS working on this damn painting.
In the final critique he actually seemed to like the painting, even though he disagreed with the composition/arrangement. At that point I was just like, "WHATEVER. I'm just glad it's DONE." This is a huge burden off of my shoulders!
14" x 20" - Acrylic - April 2007
