Salamander Process

Finished piece:

First, I started with silhouettes of the basic pose/shape, refining my idea with each new one. I don't normally start like this, but I felt it'd be easier considering the lava look that I wanted. Or something.

Once I was relatively happy with that, I scaled it up and started refining it. There are only three layers here: a background gradient, with deep red at the bottom and a desaturated blue at the top (for contrast and interest); a layer above that with all of the background painted in; and a top layer with the creature and its perch on it.

I realise that it's a massive jump from panel 1 to 2, but I don't have any older states stored, unfortunately!

While this rough version looked okay to me, there was something very *off* about it, composition-wise... It felt too busy and flat or something, because the eye wasn't drawn to any one particular spot. Both the lava and creature are very bright, so the eye is drawn equally between them. The intended focal point - the head - is also way higher than the middle, so that makes it very 'out of the way'.

I tried to rectify this a bit by desaturating the background around the head, but the problem of the lava still remained...

So, while it seems a shame to lose that rather striking lava and the idea of the salamander clinging to a sinking rock, I decided to instead redo the bottom entirely to make it a more faded, vague, not-detailed sort of hardened lava or something. This way, the eye is drawn to the brighter, more detailed part, which is the head. I also reshaped the environment to include sweeping curves and objects that direct the eye to the focal point; the rock in the lower left, for example, directly *points* to the head, saying "look over there!".

The next panel is basically just clean-up (the tail flame is made much smaller, and it points at the head).

However, the composition was unbalanced; all the stuff with a strong presence was on the right. To remedy this, I flipped parts of the bottom, giving the lizard a sort of S-curve, which is more balanced!

It was an interesting study, anyway, and I do think it's remarkable how different my first attempt (which resembles my older work, in many ways) is compared to the final one, which I produced by really thinking about it.

So maybe this is useful to you in some way!!

Oh, and I started and finished this in class, so it took about four hours (with distractions!) in total.