Tales of the Wandering Samurai

[The Mask of Norro]

click the image for a larger version

Spent a good deal of today drawing this in Illustrator. I used the pen tool and the brush tool to make everything, using an image of a tree and a sword as reference. I actually quite like how this turned out... it's supposed to look like a painting, the scene is just a tree in a grassy field, with a sword leaning against it. There's a ribbon wrapped around the sword and the tree.

The background is a bit chaotic with the brushstrokes, I used those to sorta symbolize an impeding darkness and the scattering of light, where the 'light' is white, smooth strokes and the 'darkness' is rougher, darker strokes.

What do you guys think? I'm starting to really like using Illustrator-- I still prefer Photoshop, but Illustrator at the moment is alot more fun, probably because I'm still learning.

[K]

The tree trunk is good, but with the foliage I can see the shape of the brush, which isn't so good, same with the grass. But the trunk, sword, ribbon and background are awesome.

The shape of the tree itself is great, but all the leaves look the same.

But yeah, on the whole I really like it.

[The Mask of Norro]

I still have the original .ai file, so I can make any alterations you guys think would help the piece.

With that said, thanks for the comments Keith. Think I should use the same brush effect on the foliage and grass then, or something more subtle?

[K]

I'm not sure, I never really got into digital painting , and actually my argument completely deflated when I just looked at pictures of Bansai Trees and saw that the foliage is pretty uniform.

I think maybe some more shading in the leaves would help, some dark green low lights for example.

Really just keep playing with it, let us know what happens.

[Notorious P.O.T]

I quite like it as it has a good feel to it. Looks like a really good cover for a book.

[The Mask of Norro]

In the picture I used for reference, the tree leaves seemed to be lighter towards the bottom and darker towards the top. I really need to stop being so uniform though and start taking some creative freedom, because it probably WOULD look better the opposite way.

I'll go ahead and tweak around the shading more, see how that all goes... might try and make some richer greens to rather then slight alterations on the defaults.

Edited November 6, 2006 by The Mask of Norbert