Back in Time Tuesday: Family (1996)
Finally, BIT-Tuesday reappears on a Tuesday! Shows you how upside down my life has been like lately.
For your delight, I bring you one of the first finished illustrations of Jahir and Vasiht'h from THIRTY YEARS ago... which was, in fact, an illustration for the FIRST DRAFT of Family.
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These two have been around for a long time...! But they've changed a lot! I considered myself hopeless at drawing human faces, particularly male ones, so there was no attempt at all to give Jahir a specific face. I just wanted him to have a good one. And Vasiht'h had more of a foxish muzzle, and apparently those wings not only had translucent vanes, but the limbs were furless and glossy.
And despite all that, I love this image. It's well-composed, and I handled the pencils well. My intention was to create a realistic depiction of people who weren't real and I was determined. I had used graphite in every art class I'd ever taken to do studies and shaded volumes and you can see all that experience in this (even to the point of the artful smudging). If anything, my biggest problem was impatience, because I wanted to finish the piece more than I wanted to disguise the pencil strokes.
It was ambitious, I tackled it, and I did such a good job that I remember it still as a stand-out of my early art.
Enjoy this one, friends! And if you wish to add it to your favorites (or leave a comment on it), it's at the gallery here: https://mcahogarth.org/gallery/image/loose-1996-0000-EarlyFamilyIllustration