Personal Project: Second Quarter

Here might be a good place to mention that I am incredibly competitive.  So when I watched as the 2nd and 3rd year Atelier students created gold for the personal projects, I was compelled to step it up.  The chickens were fun, but lacked content.  One piece of note that really inspired me to step up was Garima's personal project from the first quarter.  Here's a link to her site.
http://garimanaredi.com/index.html
Beyond being an incredible likeness of the hardest model we've drawn, it's packed with symbolism.  Let the challenge begin.  While I have been drawing for a fair amount of time now, a huge majority of what I've been doing have been exercises in observation, life-room, doodles, or drawing from pictures.  Up to this point I had never really constructed a completed image from composition up to finish.  The point of the following personal project was really to see what I could do.  I have to admit that I'm giddy with the results.

The following piece is titled, "Totem Pole" and began as the simple idea of a real totem pole.  Basically a pile of animals.  The plan was for this to be NW oriented, so I would incorporate all those cliche NW animals.  However, it was pointed out to me that I should aim a little higher, so I dumped a person on top.  (thank you chris!)

This was an early plan for the piece so you can see that things didnt end of exactly as they started.  I have to admit that this one sort of ran off on me.  First off I drew the bear only to realize that I was working too small.  Then I drew it again and the same thing happened.  Long story short, the final piece ended up being pretty big.  

 

You can see the reference photos that were used here.  Chris was a composite of two photos, and the animals were constructed loosely based on the photos.  The salmon and raven were pretty much from scratch.  Their references were mainly for texture.

Tad Da!!!!  Including the black foam core that this is mounted on, the total size is 4'x8'.