Pine Cone Mountain

I designed this drawing as a Christmas greeting image. As we will see below, it is a lesson of planning and letting go for me.

Process

I began with the idea of winter holiday. After some thoughts, I came up with two requirements:

1. a set that immediately conveys "winter holiday" to the audience and
2. Maggie and Faito are in the drawing.

My solution was to give them a magical place that they visit in their adventure. The place will have snow to give the winter feel. Conveying the idea of holiday was harder.

Thumbnails I drew for planning

I drew the first thumbnail with the idea of showing Faito being so happy and excited. I reinforced this with a Christmas tree in the second (yes, there is a creature head at the top of the tree that we may or may not see in the future--I have not made up my mind) and third thumbnails.

At this point I felt that I need to research more ideas for Christmas holiday symbols. (I usually researched ideas using Pinterest. You can see the images I collected in this "Ornaments" board.) One idea I liked was using a pine cone as a Christmas tree.

Pine cones are small, though. How do I explain a giant pine cone tree? Well, why not make it even larger? A Pine Cone Mountain! And so I arrived at the final idea.

As I drew the huge pine cone in the foreground, I realized that it may not be immediately recognizable as a pine cone because most of its parts were out of frame. In the final image, I added a pine cone in the background as a visual hint. I also added giant Christmas ornaments to reinforce the holiday theme.

So far so good. Except it was already Christmas when I started coloring. Pressed for time, I neglected planning for colors and values. I simply tried out color combinations and went on coloring. The result was quite far from what I wanted.

Lesson 1: never skip color and value planning.

I finished coloring just in time for the new year 2017:

Happy new year, everyone :) Wish you all a good 2017. #newyear #holiday #drawing #illustration #colorpencil #adventure #dennyisk #pinecones

A post shared by Denny Iskandar (@dennyiskart) on Jan 2, 2017 at 7:00am PST

I could have let it go and moved on, but I did not. I thought I could fix the color and values digitally, so I put in more hours to edit the image. The further I worked on it, the more I realized that I was spending time unwisely. In the end, I simply made the background lighter and added simple gradients.

So, lesson 2: let go a finished drawing.

Time is better spent planning for the next piece and working on the next piece.

As always, let me know your thoughts and comments.