The Reaper was inspired by silk miniatures similar to the one below. But on a darker tip… with nods to an apocalyptic end and Yama the Hindu god of death/lord of the underworld….a window to the other-side..

First sketch
I started off by sketching the driver/lost soul and carriage onto an A4 paper
The Reaper’s face is unknown and simply a shadow.

> Click here then read on.

As i kept sketching i started running out of space so added more pages and finished the elephant.
Which turned out looking a little like a mad Dumbo in musth.

I digitally altered the elephant to make it much larger ad more of a scary beast under The Reapers spell.
Then digitally started painting in the darks and lights from top to bottom centering around the flame adding texture and depth. No 3D elements or rendering, just photoshop layers , scanned textures and pencil..

For the final illustration i added some warmth on the left hand side and made the ground look as if it where simmering with lava.

The next step was to design a border. All hand drawn and to make sure the border proportions were correct i started on a large sheet of graph paper. I wanted the border to carry over the same beautiful yet menacing feel of The Reaper illustration. The border contains twisted plants, flowers, snakes, swords,, peacock feathers,bird cages, stairways, fire and thorns.

I ended up drawing the whole border several times before it seemed right.

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I originally wanted to get The Reaper printed onto fine silk. But a lot of the colour and detail got lost. As you can see in these samples.

Here’s the final illustration

And final gloss canvas stretched print – 72 x 94cm

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 2:06 am and is filed under Cabein, Case Studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.