Care Process Video: Creating Concepts and Stories!

So! Many people seemed to strongly resonate with my last illustration "Care," so here's a little bit of the process behind it.

I focused on creating a female carnival character with a long cape matching the moth design in the reference. Eventually, I ended up with a drawing, but it felt a bit weak, with not much to say besides the costume design and maybe a knife I threw in there at the end with no context.

So, why not push the moth concept even more by adding a lamp reference in there? After all, moths seem to be very attracted to lamps. This new layer added the perfect excuse for a male character in the composition, simply admiring a female character inspired by the lamp. That was the plan at first. I was still holding hope in the carnival costume, but the moth shape reminded me more of a fur cape than someone in a carnival suit. So, I changed towards a big warrior kind of paying respect to a queen or so.

While making the "queen," I noticed that it would be easier to render a statue than a very complex queen dress, so I changed the concept towards a warrior admiring a statue. I chose a Viking because it would justify a big fur cape and also, I imagined that this would be his reaction upon seeing a piece of art like this for the first time.

I went to bed a bit unsatisfied with the result because I thought they both looked a bit boring, maybe because the pose was too passive. The next day, a new idea popped into my head: the moth character (Viking) could be some kind of blacksmith, using his hands to create or fix the statue. I thought it would be too much hassle to change the whole character costume, so I tried to guess what kind of hand gestures would best suggest the Viking positioning the statue inside a metal-like structure. This was a bit too complex to create in my opinion, so I had little hope that people would catch the idea. But fortunately, this illustration was quite a success in my opinion. Reading plenty of comments from people creating their own stories, I think that's one of the things I love most about sharing art on social media—the reactions.

Anyways, feel free to check the process video and the file. If you have any questions, just let me know! Thank you for your support.

Full Length Process Video: https://youtu.be/0sUDufOBQHE