Shadowrun: Stormfront Lesson 3

This piece went smoothly as well. I figured out what I really needed early on with this piece, and that was a detailed thumbnail. Again, this is something they teach you in college, that the more time you spend on the foundation, the better your final will be, but for some reason I either forgot or chose to act smarter than my teachings. Regardless, this time I made sure to nail it down.

Here we have a Shadowrun secret agent in camouflage, sending information on troop movements in the forest. I was asked to fix just a few things, like size and distance, just so that she didn't look huge and she still looked hidden. Then I worked on the final.

I showed this piece to my friend who is in the army. He took a few minutes to take it in, nodded sagely, and said nothing. "What?" I said.

"Well, she's wearing a ghillie suit, but her head is uncovered!" he said, trying not to hurt my feelings.

But this is another one of those 'illustration as stage play' moments. The viewer doesn't want to see some anonymous fur suit sitting on a log, they want to see a real person, they want to see her reaction to the soldiers, how she's feeling. As my AD said when I asked what he liked about the piece: "the hot spy chick in the trees sold me!"

Final note: the girl I used as a model saw this painting and gasped. She said, "David, now I really want snake bites!" To her I say, do you really want to be a secret agent deep in the forest wearing a ghillie suit, too? I know I do.