Pumpkin Patch Agori

Pumpkin Patch Agori

This illustration may hold a future purpose and place, perhaps a scene that will be included in a story; maybe even in one of my largest stories, Life of Lewa. This illustration started off as a sloppy sketch, and became something more. I constructed an interesting scene to match the figure, feeling the most appropriate place to find him is in a pumpkin patch, hence the name "Pumpkin Patch Agori".

I used several elements to make this semi spooky looking scene. First I worked on the Agori as a figure element to be added like a collage image as the main focus on a themed backdrop (I'll speak more of the Agori below). To make my backdrop, I first took a swirly patterned desktop image and changed its color and transparency; this serves as an odd sky, a technique I've used before on another art piece displayed on my main blog, Pearllight Studio. Next I made the ground by selecting an area and coloring it with brown, then used textured brushes to create land that looked like patches of grass, leaves, and dirt. To make the scene more interesting, I took a tree element and made a brush out of it; this led to a fun process of creating a distant forest with scattered trees as we get closer to the foreground. I also dabbed more texture behind the trees to make it appear hazy and darker the further away it is. After that I had fun duplicating one image of a pumpkin and its leaves to create the pumpkin patch; all I needed to do after assembling the loose elements was tweak the levels and color. Last thing was adding the Agori, and you get the final illustration.

I think the Agori needs a name at some point, he'll probably get one in the future. What he's doing in the pumpkin patch is still a mystery, but either he's a farmer of the patch, carrying around a knife to cut the pumpkin from its vine; or my other concept is that he may be a pumpkin thief who sneaks into other people's patches and takes a pumpkin for himself to carve or eat. His armor color is made to represent the shades of pumpkin patches, making the concept of pumpkin thieving all the more interesting. If you're going to sneak in a pumpkin patch, what better colors to wear than that of the pumpkins, complete with patchy designs on the armor to blend better. No doubt this Agori loves pumpkins so much that he wears the armor all year round, and doesn't come out often until Autumn whips around the corner. Future story for this quirky Agori is in order, till then, enjoy the concept. ^.~

It amazes me how far I manged to go with such a sloppy sketch. The sketch was made long ago..probably around 2008, slapped on a page with other sketches, my hand feeling lazy. To the far left is the base sketch before improvement; the sketch never had a big significance, but I figured I'd finally make something out of it since the Agori is holding a pumpkin, and now is the season for that theme. I took this terribly sketchy image and set out to display what the sketch is, since it's hard to tell at first glance. That was fairly simple, all I did was lower opacity, put a second layer on top, and digitally drew out the form and details as best I could over this scratchy mess. To my surprise I ended up with a fairly descent character, and added a few extra elements to him which didn't exist before. The bulge around his rib cage may have been his armor, but I couldn't tell, so I made it better and changed the form into a backpack of some kind; all I needed to do was add some pockets and stitching to make it look like a bag. Then there was this funny bit of scratchiness on the character's left leg, and I think it may have been excess pen marks, but I decided to turn it into a sheathed knife. These extra details and simple base outlines resulted in the middle image above. Last step was coloring; I used shades pertaining to pumpkins since he's holding one, and felt it would be cute to make him match. After adding gray, green, orange, brown, and yellow; I splotched on some texture of green and brown to add more interest to his armor, then to add depth I used the dodge and burn tool for shading and lighting. This resulted in the above right image, a reusable element which can be placed in other scenes or even turned into a printable scrapbook sticker or die cut.

I think it turned out great for being a bad sketch at first glance; and even better is that I now I have a tree brush for future use! ^.^