Thesis, ptII - Sphinx

Here comes round two for the thesis selections, with costumes based on mythology. The second piece I starting researching is the Greek version of the sphinx, the better known one with people eating and King Oedipus and the riddles and the killing herself. Yeah. That one. Anyways.

I was super excited for this one for various reasons, one being that I love love love drawing curly haired women, and I also wanted to give the lady's figure a more plump, curvaceous look then I typically draw women with.


The leading lady:

Well I hope you're all familiar with the Greek Sphinx. Part woman, part lion, part bird, she was a monster that set herself up in a cave outside the city of Thebes, would tell a riddle to any person trying to enter the city, and eat them if they couldn't answer it. Eventually the man Oedipus came to her and solved her riddle, at which point she threw herself out of her cave and dashed herself to pieces on a bunch of rocks. Or something like that.

With the outfit and figure, I wanted to emphasize a more sensual, bountiful feel to everything. The sphinx lounged to her hearts content outside Thebes, always eating people's faces off but not exercising so much. Looking at the figure now, I feel like she still isn't quite as fleshy as I wanted her, but I'm satisfied enough with it for the time being. In any case, she has the bemused, lounging pose and casually resting her face on her hand, as if about to give a riddle to another would-be traveller.

I think the potentially neatest costume piece of the series, though, is the claw bra. I want to tie in some form of the bird's claws and hints for the lion. The figure has slit pupil cat's eyes, and the original drawing had a lion's tail peaking out from under the couch, but the tail made no sense with the rest of the piece so I removed it. The claw bra though, I think could be a super nifty thing to make, assuming I had the skills and materials to reproduce it. I came up with possible ways it could be made, but I don't know quite how likely or easy it would be.

Also, the pillows she is leaning against have a horizontal feather pattern on them to hint at the Sphinx's wings, just like the pattern for the Phoenix :)

Preliminary Thesis Concepts

So, here we go. I started on my senior year project a few weeks ago, and so far I've got seven or eight pages of concepts and designs so far. This is just a bit of a teaser for it :)

The theme for my project is character/costume design based on creatures from myth, as per my usual interest. So creatures such as the three I'm showing the sketches for right now, the Egyptian Phoenix, the Norse Kraken, and the Greek Sphinx, each figure will vaguely resemble that culture, and their outfits will look like a mix of the creature and culture hopefully.

There will also be a full illustrated piece to go with each set of concept sketches, to be done for the most part in pen and ink with watercolor washes overtop, hopefully. We'll see how it goes :)

"Birds of a Feather" - Sketches

Here is some of the process work for the "Birds of a Feather" series. It went through a number of changes throughout the months I worked on it, as you can see from the process for the "Firebird," the first one I did.

 

The idea from the start was to portray the folk lore creature, say the Inuit raven, interacting in some way with a figure dressed in the outfits of the folklore's culture. So with the initial firebird sketches, I also researched a little bit of the Slavic/Russian traditional dress. There were additional creatures I had originally planned on putting into the series, like the Inuit Raven and the Native American Thunder Bird. My concepts at that point didn't get positive feedback from the Antwerp teachers, so I changed my approach to be more of a book/encyclopedia sort of feel, as if they'd be pages from a dictionary on mythical creatures.

My ideas changed again when the teachers still weren't really feeling the encyclopedia concept, so I tried for a more storybook feel to it. Still wasn't really met with agreement. 

From there I came to my more final idea, straight black and white pieces in pen and ink washes(These still didn't meet with approval from the instructors, but I forged on anyways as the deadline was coming closer now). I still tried to stick to the "Fact or Fiction" theme by having certain words that were also personality traits written in on the pieces, as if they were almost a new sort of tarot card.

 I wound up taking the words out from the final results, but it was interesting to read and reread the folk stories and decide what lesson or knowledge there was to be learned from it.