Research
Before I do any drawing for a project, I start by researching the subject matter extensively. For this piece, which was the beginning of a currently under-wraps thesis project, I was heavily inspired by the utterly charming Gnomes book by Rien Poortvliet and Wil Hyugen. I grew up admiring this world and have wanted to illustrate my own spin on it for awhile, so why not for my senior thesis? These are some images from the book I compiled for reference, and this doesn’t even count the massive Pinterest board or giant pile of books I’ve been accumulating.
Thumbnails
After the necessary research, I start thumbnailing for how I want the composition of the piece to look. The first image is a kind of messy collection of rough ideas for what I wanted to communicate in this piece: a gnome family is throwing a celebration for their newborn child and are enjoying a dance with their neighbors and forest friends. At first, I thought the party might be a feast instead, which is what is shown in two of the thumbnails before I settled on the dance scene instead. The second image is the final rough sketch I settled on, which I like to resolve digitally so I can adjust elements in the piece easily before moving onto painting.
Value and Color Studies
Sometimes I need to do value studies, sometimes I don’t. For this piece however, I had a lot of local values and shadows to map out before beginning color. I usually try to keep the focal point in mind and work the values around that to keep it cohesive. I knew I wanted the colors to be pretty earthy with a few brighter, festive pops in the clothing, so the color studies served the purpose of deciding things like what colors the hats and elves’ skin would be. I also like to mess with saturation and color levels digitally to find a couple solutions I otherwise might not have come to.
Final
At the end of it all, this is the finished piece! Unfortunately, I get way too absorbed in painting to take process shots or videos of the final, but sometimes I remember to document a couple things on my Instagram story. This illustration in particular was painted on Arches #140 Cold Press paper, and rendered with watercolor and colored pencils. I used a lightbox to transfer the drawing from a printout onto the paper and went from there, referencing my studies and watercolor techniques of Poortvliet and a few other artists I admire. This piece was a challenge but so much fun to work on, and it really helped me settle on a thesis topic and method of painting that I enjoy.