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"In these lonely halls, abandoned and decaying, an unseen organist plays a tune. A chaotic, gothic medley that spreads along the walls… elegant, gloomy, and grand."
*Brace yourself for a long post today… ;)
Back to Halloween now! Missed yesterday's post, but I figure that's just gonna happen every now and then. I'll keep trying to post daily though. Anyway, I've decided that the remainder of my October posts are going to be a sequence of smaller parts culminating to a larger project at the end. My project? Well, every October I like to create and post a new track to my music channel on YouTube. I'm still working on the music track itself (which will be done outside of this blog), but I'll need artwork for it by the time I post it, and that's where this blog comes in.
My main plan is to create a fairly fine-tuned digital painting (1920 x 1080) as the video's background, and I'm going to be following a certain set of instructions to create it. The instructions (or process) comes from Tim Jacobus, who, if you don't know, is the creator of all those awesome covers on the "Goosebumps" books (the original set) (which I've always been mesmerized by, ever since I was a little kid)! Obviously, my painting won't be anywhere near as cool as his, but following his process should give me some insight into new methods of creating a work like this.
I won't give away all his secrets (you should read his book or check out his website for that), but the way it usually starts (Step #1) is with a simple 1-2 sentence description of a story element, character, plot, etc. of the book (or in my case… music track). You may have noticed my little description at the beginning of today's post. That's the general description I'll follow for the remainder of these posts.
Step #2, which is FINALLY what today's post is all about… is creating dozens of "thumbnail" sketches, very rough, just scribbles basically, where you play around with things (patterns, shapes, character designs, camera angles, etc.) based on that description. I forced myself to do 12 of these (exactly a dozen), which is what you see above. And I'm thankful I did. If I followed my normal process I would've skipped this stage altogether, just done it all in my head, and never really played around with things. But doing 12 of these little sketches really forced me to be more creative with it and come up with things I wouldn't have otherwise.
Anyway, tomorrow comes Step #3 & #4, which is basically selecting my 3 favorites of these thumbnails and roughing them out a bit.
P.S. Here's a link to Tim Jacobus' book if anyone's interested, published way back in 1998. It's mostly geared towards kids, so it's a fairly short and simple read, but it really is very inspiring. He's a really cool guy, with a lot of helpful information to give:
http://www.amazon.com/Came-Jersey-Artist-Goosebumps-Cover/dp/0590108530
P.P.S. He also gives a simplified version of his process on his website for free.
Alright, this post is getting way too long now, I gotta stop talking. ;) That's all for now! See ya!
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