The Making of Medusa

Hey readers! It's been a while. This blog has been sitting here, pretty stagnant for the past 4 years. Well that's all about to change! I will be frequently making posts on here, hopefully at least once or twice a week. It will be mainly my own design, painting, sketching and really anything I create by myself and with others. I also want to expose readers my inspiration, my friend's work, and any cool tips and tricks I come across. Stay tuned for lots of exciting stuff!

Now to jump in headfirst, here is the working process for this week's Illustration Friday inspiration, "Myth"

When I read the word "myth", images of monsters from old legends and stories come rushing to my mind. I've always been fascinated with scary stories, fables and creepy creatures since I was young. I remember there was a green, hard covered book that was in my elementary school library that had stories and illustrations about different monsters and legends. I remember the images and stories scared me, but I still signed it out many times to keep reading it!

For my illustration, I decided to go with the monster Medusa:

The medusa was an ugly creature. Let's have a look at how she came into existance, for she wasn't always that ugly... Again, the Gods played their role. The Medusa was the daughter of Phorkys and Keto, the children of Gaia (Earth) and Okeanos (Ocean). She was one of the three sisters known as the Gorgons. The other two sisters were Sthenno and Euryale. Medusa was the only mortal out of the three. She was once very beautiful and lived far in the north were the sun didn't visit. Being very curious, she wanted to see the sun, and asked the Goddess Athena for permission to visit the south. Athena refused to allow her to visit. The medusa got angry and dared to say that Athena hadn't given her permission because she was jealous of her beauty. that was it! Athena was angered and punished her by turning her hair into snakes and cursing her by making her so ugly that who ever lookes at her eyes would turn into stone. Source: greekmythology.com Painting by Laura Dreyfus Barney, 1892

I gathered some reference photos from Google so I could sketch out the expressions a little easier:

Here are the thumbnails I started out with:



I decided I really liked the look of the last thumbnail, so I expanded on it, adding the snakes on as her hair:



While I was sketching, this song continuously thumped in my head!



Being a huge fan of Anthrax and just heavy metal in general, I thought this would make an awesome t-shirt or poster design. Seeing recordings at concerts like this make me wish I was around to see these bands in their prime. I want to give a design an 80's grungy feel, so I added some cracks for detail, with the plan to add a concrete/stone texture in the background:



The next step was adding the band logo, which I quickly sketched behind the portrait. I mostly added it now for placement reference.



The next step will be a couple colour comps. I plan to use cool colours like purples and greens, as well as different effects on the band logo.

I decided to outline my drawing with ink, as it was pretty hard to see the details as just a pencil sketch.

Note: Fine tech pens are not the best tool to use when outlining on tracing paper. Lesson learned! ;)



I placed the drawing as a template in illustrator and began using the pen tool to outline the head, giving the shapes green fills:



I then outlined the snakes, giving them a purple fill:



Next was giving the snakes shadows and highlights. I played with different hues and blending modes here:



I added the mouth continuing with the pen tool, drawing highlights and shadows as I went along:



Then I added in details on the face, including the eyebrow and ear. I also used to brush tool to draw in the eye detail:



Last on the face was the earring and shadows:



Completing the vector work I finished off with the detail in the snakes' faces and removed the template.



Now for Photoshop, I began with creating a black background. I placed in a stock cement texture file and changed the blending mode to Hard Light. I duplicated this layer, adding a purple colour overlay to match my vector illustration. Then I added layer masks on both texture layers, creatively painting some of the texture out to create this effect:



Next was the band logo. I downloaded a vector logo and placed it as a smart object in the Photoshop file. I decided to keep the original red colour, but changed the blending mode to Dissolve and filtered with Film Grain and Blur. I thought this gave the text a spraypaint/screenprint effect:



I placed in my vector illustration, adding a green outer glow. But it still didn't look quite finished:



So I finished it with placing a texture overlay on the vector, bringing the design together:



Finally it's done! :D



I ran into a couple problems, such as merging layers in Photoshop with different blending modes. I am pretty happy with the final design though, and hopefully they get better from here on in!

Thanks for tuning in!