{"id":341,"date":"2012-08-18T10:59:33","date_gmt":"2012-08-18T01:29:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/?p=341"},"modified":"2016-02-18T11:35:12","modified_gmt":"2016-02-18T02:05:12","slug":"balance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/balance\/","title":{"rendered":"Balance"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I painted this picture as a Christmas present for John back in 2010. When I uploaded it to deviantArt<\/a>, I promised, “I’ll upload concept and progress sketches to my blog after Christmas.”<\/p>\n

Wel’p Christmas came and went and another one too, and it’s finally time for me to fulfil that promise.<\/p>\n

The Idea<\/h2>\n

I wanted to paint a picture that could be quite personal but would also be quite ‘accessible’ to the casual viewer as just a pretty illustration. Based on this I discarded the possibilities of doing portraits and looked instead to find suitable avatars of myself and John. The answer was quite simple – Zodiac animals. What fortune that I had such a great pair of animals to work with, too!<\/p>\n

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Rawr!<\/p><\/div>\n

Conflict<\/h3>\n

Do a google search for ‘dragon tiger’ and you’ll immediately find images of the two locked in combat. Frequently poised over a Yin-Yang symbol, the two animals represent balance.<\/p>\n

My first concept sketches attempt to riff on this idea.<\/p>\n

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Finding my feet with drawing tigers…<\/p><\/div>\n

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<3<\/p><\/div>\n

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Finding nice flowing lines is easy when working in ink.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Purpose<\/h3>\n

The hearts felt hackneyed and the composition uncomfortable. I decided that I wanted to portray the dragon and tiger as an exuberant and harmonised pair. For this I decided to move them in the same direction, as though they were running toward a common goal.<\/p>\n

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A very tiny thumbnail with the new composition scribbled out. I think I’d intended originally to have the animals in some kind of setting, possibly clouds or a mix of cliffs and flames to go with the elemental years we were born in.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Scribbles to work out the tiger’s pose.<\/p><\/div>\n

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I wanted to present a quite stylised tiger. I had been inspired by a piece of art that had recently been printed on the back cover of ImagineFX.<\/p><\/div>\n

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More experimenting with the style and pose of the tiger.<\/p><\/div>\n

Unfortunately my laptop was stolen around March 2011 so I’m missing all the Photoshop sketches and any progress scans I took. But for a quick run-down of my process I think it went something like this…<\/p>\n