BA1 - Silhouettes

And so the 100+ silhouettes are now done! Since I have never done silhouettes before, I decided to try out different techniques to find out what suited me best.

At the beginning my silhouettes were too refined. I struggled with painting without thinking about the end result, so it didn't turn out as random shapes. Instead they became silhouettes of images that I already had in mind, thus ruined the points of silhouettes.

I quickly realised I could not continue doing them like this. I decided to loosen up and just draw random blobs that slightly resembles a human shape and create stuff from there.

After trying a few silhouettes using this approach, I started to play around doing a 2nd pass of the characters. I then noticed that working with negative space allowed me to start with creating random blobs. I then explored the shapes and as a result made a clearer view of what I saw within those blobs. So I started to do the rest of the silhouettes with another brush and from there, picked my favourites and gave them a 2nd pass.

(1st Pass)

(2nd Pass, Using negative space)

When using negative space in my silhouettes, I managed to get out a bit more detail to the silhouettes without removing the randomness of it. As you can see, after a while I decided that my Hunter would be a female hunter and thus the rest are female.

(These are my five favourites so far.)

Of all silhouettes I made, the one below really stood out to me. I decided to base my final piece on this silhouette. I think this pose would be suitable for my final piece as it reflects my characters personality and portraits a sense of mystery.

(My favourite one)