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Friday, April 22, 2011

If Frankenstein was a cow in a steampunk inspired spaceship (for CBIG and IF)

The prompt for the CBIG blog this month is, “Earth,” and the prompt this week for Illustration Friday is, “Journey.” After the fun I had last week putting Frankenmoo in a bottle, I decided to create* another picture of him that would work with both of these prompts. I had tons of ideas, but decided to go with this one:



This image idea came from thinking about two really great titles: 1. Stop The World, I Want To Get Off (a play that I saw as a kid) 2. Around The World In Eighty Days (saw the movie when I was a kid and always loved the idea of sailing around the world in a balloon). I combined the two titles to show Franken Moo leaving the earth in a spaceship.

Some of the inspiration for the spaceship design comes from looking at steampunk flying machines (which are really cool looking). Some of them have wings, which I added to the spaceship. Some of them also have hot air balloon type things attached to the top of the flying machines. This spaceship originally had a hot air balloon looking object on top, helping it to fly, but it didn’t look right. I erased the balloon before erasing the strings. I liked having the strings there, but without anything on top, it looked a little weird … so I made them into antennas!

Now it looks like the spaceship is alive. That wasn’t my original plan, but I like it! Happy accidents in art are excellent, even if you can’t plan for them.

* Created by painting the black outline in ink and coloring digitally.

p.s. Happy Earth Day!

Friday, April 8, 2011

If Frankenstein was a cow stuck in a bottle (bottled for IF)

The prompt for Illustration Friday this week is “bottled.” For some reason, I immediately thought of my character, Frankenmoo, stuck in a bottle. I considered just drawing the bottle around him to finish quickly, like this (original Frankenmoo / Frankenmoo Bottled):



That wasn’t much fun or very creative though. Plus, I really wanted to paint something, so I got out my brushes and ink to make a new image* of Frankenmoo in a bottle:



I’m much happier with this image of Frankenmoo looking scared and smooshed in his bottle.
Which version do you like better?
* I drew this image freehand with a brush, painting Frankenmoo first, then painting the bottle around him. (This was my third attempt. It didn’t work to paint the bottle first and then try to fit him in it.) After the ink dried, I scanned it in and colored it digitally. I wanted to paint it with either watercolors or acrylics, but my scanner doesn’t scan these colors well and I wanted them to match the original colors.