2014 Calendar - Rejected Ideas Part 3

March

For this series, this is actually the first picture I started on. I got the idea from looking at Edward Hopper's "Night Windows" and said : I want to make a calendar series with pictures like that! At this point in time, I hadn't drawn anything for a few months (Stress related. Sensitive artist and all that).  When you compare this to what ended up in the series, it's like night and day. You can tell here that my skills need work. I had no idea what to do with the lighting, the colors are hideous, and the person is drawn horribly. I like to put this next to the finished one to see what a difference practice makes.

Does this look familiar? I ended up using this as the image for the cover, but it actually started out as the image for March.  After the abysmal first attempt for March, I decided to do the pictures in order. As you read from the January drafts, that didn't go smoothly, but I eventually found my rhythm. When I came around to do March again, I had an idea of using one of those old neon signs you see on many old hotels. I always liked the look of the big signs on rooftops. At this point in the series, I had finished February the night before  working on this and I didn't want to do a simple image. I wanted to stretch the limits of my talents. I like the bold image of the hotel sign on the roof of a building surrounded by many other buildings. I'd never drawn a huge cityscape before so I wanted to see if I could do it. I like how it turned out and this was to be the final image in the series. But when it came time to do a cover, the drafts I worked on didn't seem to work. I decided to take this and rework it to be the cover, but that meant I had to do a new image for March. The new March image became one of the best. Probably because I had done so many pictures at that point, I had all of my skills in order. I whipped it up in one evening.

So there you have it. All of the other images in the series had no other drafts to them. Three out of twelve isn't such a bad percentage. What's next? Not sure. while I worked on this series I had so many new ideas I don't know where to start. Stay tuned and thanks for your support!