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THE RED DEATH Commissioned Piece ILLUSTRATION
PROJECT OVERVIEW This was a commissioned piece by local Author Jacob Thornburg. He had written a horror/thriller book about a plague called The Red Death that targets and kills children, thus threatening the existence of the human race. This illustration shows the innocence of a child being blown away to dust, leaving only a skeleton. I also drew it as an allegory for how time steals youth, and the only inevitability is death. The book is yet unreleased. The illustration was done with graphite pencil, ink, and digitized in Adobe Photoshop. METHODOLOGY Approaching this project, I wanted to do an illustration that was very symbolic of the story Jacob Thornburg was trying to portray in his horror/thriller novel. I studied the skeleton of a small child as well as stages of human decomposition. The goal was to create a scene of the innocence and essence of a child being blown away by the wind as an allegory of time. I added the flowers to the composition to help emphasize the point that everything returns to dust. Beginning the illustration I sketched the idea with graphite pencil and used a cross-hatching technique to add texture and shade with black ink. In the background, I added swirls of a blood-red color that are very dark and almost unnoticeable to help set the tone of a deathly wind blowing through. I then scanned the illustration and made some minor edits in Adobe Photoshop. color palette
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final illustration
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