Eragon concepts...

As trailers for ERAGON are out now I thought I'd share some concepts that accompanied a computer game proposal. I was given a week to do some sketches and colour studies based on the main characters and elements from the Christopher Paolini book.

Below are two sketch pages showing ideas for Eragon himself, the dragon, Saphira, Eragon's sword, and Saphira's egg, plus some rough pose compositions for the colour image...


Below - colour treatment of Saphira's egg, and stages in painting Eragon...

This is the final presentation image...

Here are some images from the film. I particularly like the feathery treatment of Saphira's scales, especially on the wings - it makes a nice change from bat-like dragon wings. It looks like the design is fairly close to the original hardback book cover illustration. From what I've seen in the trailers, Saphira's head/face design looks quite interesting also - to me it looks like it has subtle equine and feline features blended into a reptilian head.

DC Comics Sample Pages...

I've recently been preparing notes and artwork for an Illustration workshop which I'm teaching, when I found this two-page sample that I did for DC Comics last year.

A script was provided, with panel descriptions & dialogue, but without any background information or visual reference, so it was very open to interpretation.

Anyway, these are the ink skratchings and pencils that I drew whilst trying to get a handle on the panel layouts and composition...



These are layouts created from scanned pencil drawings and then shuffled and re-composed in Photoshop to fit the correct page format. I also put in rough indications of the dialogue elements to make sure the storytelling aspect of the panels worked properly...



And here are the final pencils!

I can't say I was overly happy with the end results at the time - I think I was a bit star-struck by the whole 'DC Comics' thing! I feel that I tightened up a bit, and missed an opportunity to do more lively & individual images. I still haven't managed to work on a project for DC yet - but maybe one day!