New WIP & Phantasma Update

Hello friends! 

Do you know that feeling when you have a plan for something and you're determined to work through all the steps and it's going really well, and then one day you wake up and it all seems like a terrible idea? Well, that happened. 

I had this whole plan how I was going to tackle my Phantasma project and I wrote it all down. Step 1: Make ALL the concept art for the characters, locations etc. Step 2: Refine the story and break it down into scenes and frames. Step 3: Create Storyboards. Step 4: Paint a selection of frames to create a linear story, starting from the beginning.
Btw, the ultimatew goal here is this: The final story is going to have the length of a movie and I eventually want to pitch it to an animation studio and publish all the artwork in a book - like an Art Of book for the movie that doesn't exist (yet). 

So, I've been working on the concept art for a while and I've enjoyed it. But suddenly, I felt really restricted by my own plan and was itching to get to work on proper illustrations again. And the original format I had planned (wide, movie format for every single storyboard and painting) also seemed very limiting. So long story short, I decided to ditch the idea of doing everything in a linear fashion and instead, I'm just going to paint pieces of the story (in whatever format feels right) until they all fall into place like a puzzle and can be rearranged. 

It was still super helpful to create the concept art first to get an idea about the world. And I'll still keep doing that when I quickly need to visualise something. But for now, I think I have a good grasp on everything and I really, really want to immerse myself in the world and story, without working around it. 

That brings us to this work in progress. I wanted to show Leigh in her forest at the beginning of the story. I imagine her running and jumping around, climbing trees and rocks. She's one with nature and just knows her way around every part of the forest. 

Oh, and I recently tried out Clip Studio Paint for the first time! The 3D models are really useful to get more dynamic poses and weird angles And especially working with multiple figures will be so much easier! I'm so glad I got to experiment a bit with new software over these last few months. I almost exclusively use Procreate for sketching now, Photoshop for colour, Clip Studio for the models and who knows, maybe for colour in the future? 

I also included an image of the model I built for Leigh's pose. And I saved a second version for the lighting I'm planning. Extremely useful!