Developing Stages
At first, I made very detailed traditional drawings of my illustrations that I'd scan in and trace, but later I skipped that step entirely once I'd got more comfortable skeching digitally.
This piece was meant to represent Erskine diving back into his research and rekindling his obsession with Mr. W.H, but I got very carried away and the composition quickly lost all meaning and legibility. I keep thinking that it only needs one more tweak to make it work, and then I'll spend a whole day on it doing all sorts of adjustments I'd never planned.
I had done a piece a bit like this a few years ago, where I'd taken a classic painting of a couple embracing and kept one of them as a white space, though here it would symbolise Shakespeare's relationship with W.H, where his devotion and love is preserved forever but his lover's identity is lost to the winds of time. These two illustrations will either go at the beginning and end of the story, or on facing pages.
I don't think its clear enough that they're wearing comedy and tragedy masks, so I want to incorporate that motif somewhere else in the intro / outro pages.
This one is just a pattern I made on a whim, though it might make a good end page or background for an illustration.
