A friend of mine and her mum have commissioned me to do a picture for them, it will be a 60th birthday present for her dad. The picture is to remind them of a family trip to Canada this summer. They would prefer the image to be in black and white. They have been to see my work in the Sock Gallery Exhibition and love the intricacy and detail of the piece. They are going to provide me with a few images from their holiday but they would also like me to look at images of whale watching in Canada which they didn’t manage to capture themselves while they were there. The final outcome must fit the mount they have provided me with which is 7 x 5 inches in size.
Ellie sent some photos over to me but I felt like I needed a bit more information so I could gather other relevant reference images to work with as well. As she is a close friend of mine I am in regular contact with her and haven’t been contacting her in a formal way about this commission. This is the gist of the information I got from her. Questions What type of bear is it in the first image? What kind of whales were you watching? Where abouts was the picture of the mountains and lake taken? Answers It is a black bear. Humpback whales. Unsure about the name of the mountain range but it was definitely the Athabasca river and it was a white water rafting location near Jasper. The roughs I am going to produce are going to merge elements from different images, I like the idea of having those specific mountains as the background but I’ll have to see what I come up with during the process.
I had originally planned to sketch out the best roughs again before sending them to Ellie but instead I thought adding a few tonal values on Photoshop gave the images enough depth to get my idea across. I have said that after she has picked an image, then I can price it up and get back to her with how much the comission will cost overall.
She was really pleased with them and after consulting a few other people she decided on the image of the whale breaching from the water. So now I know this I can be getting on with it, theres plenty of reference imagery for this kind of image so I shouldn’t have a problem with piecing something together.
Pencil Sketch
Final Image (completed with 0.1mm fineliner)