War Priest of Thune Final Drawing

Wow! what a whirlwind of a week! So full of inspiration and excitement this years Illustration Master class was yet again an amazing experience that I will take with me and cherish for the rest of my life. I have been fortunate enough  to have attended for the past three years and I am constantly blown away by the week spent with some of my favorite illustrators. Everyone is extremely generous with their knowledge and insight on the industry. It is a true pleasure to get to spend the sleepless hours during this past week drawing, painting, hearing from, and talking to some wonderful people. 
I was hoping that I would be able to post some progress throughout the week, but my desire to work and hang out as much as possible wasn't too conducive to spending time on the computer. So i apologize for keeping everyone in the dark!
As you may recall from my previous post I had set out with a small preliminary sketch to see what the instructors had to say. After a long day of great critiques it was back to drawing board. Most changes were fairly minimal to my satisfaction. 
After spending a couple nerve-racking hours trying to fix my little sketch into something usable, Jeremy Jarvis (Magic© Art Director) came around and asked me how long I spent to make the initial sketch. "about an hour or two," i said nervously. He looked ponderously at me and shook his head. "And how long have you spent screwing around with this one?" he asked. "Err 3 hours or so..." i replied as i craned my neck to look at the clock secretly knowing what he'd say next. "You need to trash this one and start over. It's going to be impossible to fudge this one into working." He told me much to my dismay (though I knew it). So after a deep sigh..it was back to the drawing board to start fresh and try to get life back into my drawing. But! even though it was a pain to start over again I managed to make an even better drawing than I had to begin with. This is something I could have never done at home in my studio by myself. I would've noodled away on that little drawing far longer than necessary hoping it would pull together, and it probably never would have.


So here's what came out of that as my final drawing: (apologies for the poor image. This is a photo on the easel as I had finished it with just the over head lighting)

After just a couple hours I had this bigger drawing together and Jeremy walked by again. "Nice! now we're talking!" he said "now go paint it!"....I was feeling great now knowing that I was able to turn the image around into something good. Of course as I walked away eager to get to work he called out to me as i left the room, "Don't fuck it up!"....gotta love the pressure. :)

So the moral of the story is: If your drawing is sucking start over...and if you fix your drawing and go to paint it...don't fuck it up!