Another Indie Royale illustration...

When asked to draw something pertaining to the subject of "Debut" for the upcoming Indie Royale bundle, you could say my creative brain had popped out for a scone and afternoon tea. Nope, no ideas forthcoming until Graeme (IndieRoyale bundle master) suggested a stage with curtains, and thus the image of an old theatre and it's rather rouge stage dressing made it's presence known in my mind! That's it I thought and promptly scribbled down some ideas using my favourite digital painting application, MyPaint.(I sound like an anorak!)

Here's the final result currently live on the Indie Royale site, though once this bundle goes live this link will of course be outdated!

If we look at my original rough below it doesn't look quite like the finished one seen above..Here's why...

I wanted the art to stand out more from the screen than this initial sketch and one quick trick is to use our old friend perspective. For the finished art I would need to draw some perspective lines for the wooden planks on the stage, so why not carry those lines out a little further and use them as a guide for not only the stage, but also the curtain tops too! Seen below you can just make out my blue guide lines which form the basis on which the planks were drawn.

By curving the front of the stage downward not only do we force the perspective out, we also draw the eye towards the centre as the whole stage takes on a bowed appearance. This is re-enforced once I added in the microphone stand. Although the vanishing point is masked behind the red curtain it is important enough to create just enough perspective in order to draw the eye in and complete the illusion of depth. Compare the original rough to the finished illustration and you can see this in full effect.

*Created on my ageing laptop using MyPaint 1.1, Gimp 2.8 and a Wacom tablet running under Linux Mint 14 KDE, which I have to say runs rings round my windows Vista desktop PC that I normally use.