Newest project completed

A lovely woman that I know from when I was in high school asked me to make a monster for her. She is a weight lifter, and her son gave her the nick name "Monster". She wanted something to reflect that on her gear. The image you see below is the final product of what I created for her. She was absolutely in love with it. I am so happy! I can't wait to see her print it on her gear.  

I've also posted pictures at the bottom that show how I got to this point. I don't usually accept projects for face drawings. But I've been itching to get back into drawing, so I took the challenge. She had said she wanted a monster image of some sort but didn't really know what and gave me several examples. We talked about: did she want it to be more illustrative or tribal tattoo-ish because she had images going both ways. We decided on illustration. I asked did she like more full body or just a face. We went with face. And just kind of kept going from there while I looked at her reference idea photos she had pulled from the internet.

THE PROCESS

So, when I did this one, I realized I needed to go back and re-study face proportions. Ha ha. It's been awhile since I've done this kind of drawing tbh. I like doing out of proportion faces and elongating them. I needed to get out of that mode. 

Oh and she wanted to try horns! She was happy with the horns but then we needed to pick hair to go with them. So I tried a kind of side pony tail mohawk sorta thing from my original drawing. 

After studying face proportions again, I came up with this drawing. The black marks on the face were supposed to be reminiscent of metal, since she is a weight lifter. She had orc images in her reference photos, so that was the direction I went.

Then we tried a down hairdo. One had much longer hair, and we tried it a little bit shorter like shown here. She almost went with this one. But I told her to take a couple of days to think about it. To make sure it's really what she wanted. 

I asked for photos of her weight lifting. I wanted to have a better understanding of what it is she does. The kind of faces she makes. I also looked at her profile pics on FB. This doesn't look like her, but has nuances of her face. Especially the eyes.

A day or so later she texted and asked what about just plain bald. So I gave it a go and added some more markings on the scalp so it wasn't just bare. And it became the winner! I did a final drawing, inked it, scanned it, and then manipu-lated it in Illustrator. 

I hope you readers like this post, because I really like seeing my process all laid out like this. It's kind of awesome to see them all together. And where it started to where it ended up! 

Thank you so much for reading, and I'll post again soon!

​Ally :)