Author: Chad Frye

Often when creating an illustration, planning is always a good idea, especially when you have a client to please. That means at minimum creating detailed thumbnails, a detailed drawing, and a color rough for the client’s approval. This also lets the artist play around with things fast and easy to find exactly what he wants the art to look like. When left to my own devices (as I am for this project), I sometimes throw caution to the wind by not doing all that prep work in advance.

I’ll always start with a thumbnail as I showed you in Part 1 of these Wild Thing posts, but I bypassed the whole color rough stage. I opted instead to wing it color-wise. There’s something inherently dangerous about this approach. Perhaps it makes me feel a little more artistic by playing things more spontaneously in the moment. It’s just a little wild – kind of like my subject matter.

So, I say that because as I choose my colors for this piece, I only have two things to go on: 1. Maurice Sendak’s colors from his original book, and 2. the image lodged in my head (which often looks grander and more lush than can ever be possible here in real life). I know my colors are going to be a little more bold than the original Where the Wild Things Are. Mr. Sendak’s palette was a little subdued which worked really great for his story. I want mine to pop a little more, but even I don’t subscribe to the bright primary colors. They’ll still be a bit tamed. So, I’m off to find that balance.

Enough pontificating. On with the art!

Compared to the last image I posted in Part 4 of these progression reports, you can see that the above painting has entered the realm of color for the characters. The monster now has some skin tone on his face, and a base color applied to his torso. You can see that the purple underpainting is holding nicely for the shadows of his face. They will be accentuated a bit more later on in the colored pencil stage. This is when it starts getting exciting for me as things are just now coming to life.

In the image directly below, you can see that now the mane of the Wild Thing has been painted in with tones of blue and brown. Yes, it did cover a bit of the purple underpainting, but you still can see hints of purple poking through.

Also, I felt the light shade I laid in on the torso in the top image was too light. So, here I added a darker yellow/orange tone. This did cover the purple too much, so the purple was darkened a bit. He is a striped beast, so later a series of orange stripes will be added.

Now that I look at these base colors, that background does seem a little too brilliant. I may have to tone it down a bit so that it is more complimentary and less competitive with the foreground figures.

Come back tomorrow for Part 6 which will be my final progression report before the unveiling of the final painting on TerribleYellowEyes.com on Friday.

Today in the progression of my Where the Wild Things Are tribute painting being created for TerribleYellowEyes.com, the time has come to show you the background.

In Part 3, you saw an explanation for the purple underpainting. Now I want to start laying in the actual colors of the piece. My intent with the leaves is to ultimately paint them each with a cool green (cool means a little blue-ish in tint) slightly different from one another. Mr. Sendak did that in his book on the spread that inspired this composition. I’m not really trying to mimic, but rather maintain the tone – the feeling – of the original.

So, before I hit those leaves with a cool green, perhaps spreading a warmer wash of yellow/green would be good. Since this is watercolor, a transparent and wet medium, this tone will not only bleed through the next layer a little, but will also mix in to the next layer of wet paint that’ll be applied. It’ll help give a little commonality to all the leaves despite the fact that I’ll be using about five or six different shades of green for them in the end.

So, now that the foundation for the leaves has been laid, it’s time to mix the shades of green to be applied next. You’ll notice in the image above that the purple underpainting is still showing through. I may have painted that underpainting a little light now that I look at it. Another layer or two is going to be applied to that area which may cover that purple. Ah well. I rarely look at a piece and think that something was a mistake. The painting is a living breathing thing with no one solution to solving a problem. I’ll keep pressing forward and see what happens.

Next, the application of all the various blue-greens. The greens are going down a little hot, and a little warmer than intended. Hard to tell yet if the background will compete with the characters. If it does, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. No big deal.

Come back tomorrow to see Part 5 in which I’ll share with you the beginning of painting the characters. It all leads to seeing the finished piece at TerribleYellowEyes.com on Friday!