Friday, February 3, 2012

Suspense


The Illustration Friday theme for the week is "suspense". I did this piece for a magazine article a couple of months ago. In the article, the father feels prompted to check on his young sons sleeping in the back of the camper truck while traveling on an early morning camping excursion. He finds them passed out from carbon monoxide poisoning, but they are revived because he listened to the prompting. The moment I chose to depict is that moment of suspense when the father doesn't quite know what is going on as he looks in the back of the truck. The light from the flashlight served to illuminate the bottom of this full page article. I cropped off the fade to white.


Once again, it's nice to have a willing model in a pinch as I used myself for this project. My indulgent wife shot the photos which I pieced together to get my photo comp from which to draw. This piece was painted entirely in Photoshop after I scannned in my drawing.

7 comments:

Patti said...

nicely done.

Coreopsis said...

I can barely think about the situation--and what an incredible tragedy it would be. Your illustration is marvelous. I use myself (and my kids) for models a lot too.

k.h.whitaker said...

very nice :)

Jack Hunter said...

A very powerful illustration - especially given the back-story. Thanks, too, for the other inspiring posts on your blog. Lots there to absorb ...

Unknown said...

thanks for your nice comments everyone. I use myself, my family, friends and neighbors for models, much like Norman Rockwell did. It's fun for me and fun for them to show up in a painting.

Kayla Moning said...

This is incredible, such an expressive picture and the end result is great. I love the colour scheme you've used here.

Angel said...

This is GORGEOUS! I'm glad the story turned out well in the end. I can imagine how his heart must have stopped in that moment. Great colors.