For this project, I had to pick three words from a bowl, being a noun, adjective, and verb, and illustrate them as a whole.
Sip, Drab, and Chess
I started off by googling the words I had gotten so I could get a better understanding of what I was working with. Once I knew the, thankfully very few, different definitions of the words, I took to sketching out my ideas. I drew the words "chess", "drab", and "sip" and had to combine them in my head. Typically, most people think of a queen or king piece when they think of chess, but my first thought is usually the rook or knight for some reason, so I went with a rook for a starting point. Sip as a verb brings drinking to mind, however, the noun eludes to a small amount of drinkable liquid, which showed through in some of my sketches but most involved drinking something. Drab was the second easiest part, with it meaning a lack of interest, something dull, or a dull brown color, I had several bits of variation all leading to the same place. With all this in mind, I had my final sketch, my default character, myself in a small/chibi style form, sitting atop a giant rook while drinking from a cup with a bored and disinterested look on my face, all in front of a chessboard background with a brown color pallet.
A Sip On A Drab Rook
After my sketch was done, I took to illustrator to get to work. I started out in a difficult situation of not knowing where to start. I knew I had to show all of the skills I had learned thus far, however, I kept trying to start by doing everything at once and was getting nowhere. So I got my head straight and started with tracing over the sketch with a brush I had made in illustrator. Once I had my outlines, I began to build shapes around them in some places to appeal to my current style I've been using with my art lately. I then took to adding in color where it was needed and made gradations and other effects in places I thought they'd look best.
Original Sketch
This project taught me more than I thought it would. It showed me how much I had retained and learned from the course and what I still had to go back into past exorcises to try and learn them again. More than anything, I learned that the simplest and easiest of ideas can still take a lot of time and effort to put out.
