Illustration Friday - Wool

For one of the Illustration Friday topics that recently came up, I was quite surprised that I found 'Wool' as the theme. Really, 'Wool'? Well, if you say so. This one made me go into thinking mode for a while. What can I link my art into that has to do with the theme of wool? Well, wool comes from sheep, maybe I can do something with sheep since they are the main source for wool besides goats, llamas, camels and the like. But then I looked at my current artwork and thought to myself, how can I link this to the myth/fantasy theme that I have going at the moment? So I went into my Rodin's The Thinker pose and tried to remember what kind of mythological or fantasy-like aspects that I can link with wool in mind. Then it hit me . . . Hermes!
Hermes is probably one of the more well-rounded of the Greek Gods that is not only the messenger of the Gods, but also the Greek God of trade, commerce, luck, transitions and boundaries. He also was more involved with mortal affairs and was the patron God of travellers, herdsmen, thieves, orators inventors, tricksters and so on. In his youth, he was a trickster and love to steal sheep as a mischievous prank to play on herders. Ergo, for this topic, I chose to draw a young, cartoony Hermes playing with some sheep. Here, little Hermes is lifting up one of the sheep near him as if he's a strongman. Also, he's wearing what I call a wool loincloth. Can't have him running around naked like a little jaybird! He's drawn using a blue drawing pencil on paper.

After getting the concept on paper, I decided to clean up and transfer the drawing by tracing over it into pencil. Not to mention trying to do the finished project with a light blue pencil drawing as a base is hard on the eyes. Here, all of the structural guide lines are removed for a more polished piece.

For this work, I chose to make the completed work on Adobe Illustrator. I outlined the drawing with the pen tool and took into all of the curves and shapes. This is a WIP of the rough outline, I'll edit the shapes as I do the colouring.

Here's a screen capture of the basic colouring of the drawing. So far the colours look alright to move on with, however I want to make adjustments to the piece later.

With a few tweaks to the vector shapes, I made a new layer and added the highlights and shading to the characters. I changed a few colours here and there to help balance the colourful composition.

With the characters set, I now complete the image with a background. Little Hermes is on a hill, showing off his strength by holding up a sheep like a strongman. Way to go, Little Hermes!

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