Tonight I'm posting a work in progress of Thom Yorke. This is a very small, rough, quick study done mostly in liquify except for the head. It's what I call a "liquify sketch". I had this image of Thom Yorke which is very small, poor detail, grayscale and just not a good image... except for the pose, or at least it has potential. I love that pose and decided to do a little experimenting and see if I can bring this thing to life. When I saw this pose, I thought of Norman Rockwell and those awkward spindly bodies he painted, so that's kind of the feel I'm going for here. I'm starting with an all grayscale study to get the values right. I've caricatured the body to close to what I'm after and the face was an unfinished one I had laying around. Again, this is a very quick conceptual sketch that I will use for reference on the final image. I'm not positively sure I will use this head. It was just convenient at this stage to get an idea if this will even be worth my time. I will ultimately use some techniques I've been working on to increase the size of the body considerably while enhancing and adding detail, texture and in the end full color. This is going to be a real test of all the hard work I've put in this past year. It will definitely be my biggest challenge. The two source images are below as well as the head which is in a very unfinished state and only sort of blocked in as far as the shape of the head. Much will change before the final product. Well, there you go. That's what I'll be doing for the next two or three days around a commission I'm working on. Hopefully my next Thom Yorke post will be a cool one. Goodnight folks!
Thom Yorke posing for a magazine shoot:
