The Son of the Forest and the River Breakdown

Alright, let's start this breakdown with my inspirations and influences for this series, there were many, so I will go in order of importance.

The biggest influence was certainly the movie The Witch:

Not so much in tone or story, but more in the setting and visuals, and that's usually what sparks new ideas for me, most of the time, first comes the visuals, and later the story or tone around it, for this particular series, I had this image of the boy with the glowing eyes, thick black hair among dead trees for a while now, and I made a few iterations of this concept before it matured in this series.

Each iteration had a slightly different vibe, but that's how things usually work on my creative process, I start with a vage idea or concept, and I keep refining and changing it until I feel like I hit the core of idea, things rarely come folly formed for me.

In regards to the format, it is obviously inspired by Fairy Tale books, but more specifically, what made interested in this format was an old series of books published here in Brazil called "Conte Outra Vez" (Tell Again)

I remember have a couple of these books when I was young, and while I didn't much care for the stories themselves, I use to spend hours just looking at the drawings

About a year ago I stumbled with some scans of the books on twitter and it just struck me as the perfect format for my kind of work, the illustration is the main thing, but the bit of text helps telling the story, without taking away too much attention from the art, and it has been really fun to try my hand a bit of writing too ^^

When it comes to the visuals, some of my influences were:

Yuri Shwedoff

Jodie Muir

Hamlet Machine

Joel Jurion

Each one of them inspired in a different way, from Yuri Shwedoff I took the glowing eyes and the overall mood, Jodie Muir inspired me with her amazing rendition of hair, and the kind of gothic vibe, Hamlet Machine is just peak value composition, and Jurion is a master of composition lines, information density, and the use of negative space for composition, all of them a great artists that are worth checking out ^^

As for the art itself, I tried something different with this series, I tried making all the pictures under 2 hours each, with varying success, most of the times, I did manage to stay around 2:20hs.

this one was the fastest, done in about 40mins:

this was the slowest, done in 5 hours:

I've noticed a few things working this way, but in general, the two major takeaways I got were

1 - you mind get tired faster as you can't really go into autopilot at any moment, so you're in "decision making" mode all the time, at some point you just get really tired of thinking.

2 - The sooner you start laying down your values the better, in particular you ambient occlusions and you big value areas, these are the core stuff that will make or break the composition, so I find that the quicker you're able correctly put then down, the less you gonna fuss around in the shading stage.

On the 40mins pic I had my main values down with just 5 mins:

On the 5 hours one I started laying down the values about 2 hours into the process:

Of course this will depend a lot on the picture's complexity, this second pic is much more complex, getting the perspective right took some time, but in general, how fast you are able to lay down the values seems to be a important aspect when it comes to getting things done quickly.

Also, I think having a strong visualization of the scene in your head before starting is a major influence on how things will go once you start drawing, fixing stuff on your head is always faster than figuring them out on paper.

I lost a lot of time trying to figure out the transition in this area here, where the trees in the background meet with the fence in the foreground:

for this area I was mixing 3 different refs:

And I feel like if I had plan this area better, it could have been greatly simplified to be more readable, and also avoid too much hatching. Joel Jurion is great at simplifying the background into simple shapes and lines, while still maintaining a good sense of place and space:

So in short, what I'm taking out the most from this experiment in time constraint is:

• Need to plan better my values and silhouettes so I can start the picture with a strong visualization of the composition.

• I need to put down the major values as quickly and correctly as possible to avoid too much fussing around.

• Drawing faster also means getting mentally tired faster, so got to have this in mind when plan the project size.

And that's it friends! hope this breakdown was useful ^^

Cheers and thanks for the support!