I love working on commissions for bands. If it weren’t for the creativity and brilliance of these artists, I wouldn’t be able to post blogs with such tantalizing titles as, “Giant Succubus Space Faerie.”

It’s ideas like these that remind me of my own artistic downfalls. I tend to put myself in boxes and create stories about what I can and cannot do. Art isn’t meant to have boundaries and when I let myself become too weighed-down by ideas of normalcy, I work more rigidly…. I know this rigidity shows in my work too.

What I’m really striving for right now is more fluidity, experimentation and risk-taking. I need to literally sit back and take in the bigger picture. Being approached to do a commission of a Giant Succubus Space Faerie might just be the perfect elixir.

I spent a few hours doing ugly doodles that probably don’t look much like art, but at this point I was really just working through compositional possibilities and trying not to overthink the execution. There were some layouts that worked but didn’t make sense for the project, some that definitely did not work, and one layout that I quickly established as the best choice even though I continued to work on additional ideas.

It was clear at this point that I could start to expand on this concept. So I began work on the final drawing. I checked my initial concept and reworked parts of it by loosely applying the rule of thirds, and creating a layout that would work in a vertical, horizontal or square crop so it can be fit into a variety of possible designs (the most likely format being square).  I wanted it to feel really dynamic, so I chose to purposefully push parts of the character in, and out of the frame and I tried to leave good ‘unimportant’ space below and above the focal points where typography could overlap the artwork without taking away from it. Finally, I started to hone in on the details about who this character is, adding horns, a third eye, scales and demon-like faerie wings.

The goal here was to see the broader picture of design before I become too caught-up in the smaller details (like scales). I feel like I am learning.