Loosely Inspired by Marcos Chin

 Amy told me about an artist called Marcos Chin, and mentioned it might be useful for me to take inspiration from his work... specifically the line work.

First of all after looking at his work I really like it. I found an image that I really like and another photo of Iggy Pop by Annie Leibovitz, of which would be the basic of my character in the piece.

He's in good shape for his age yah?

I started with a elongated landscape canvas, because I wanted my piece to be somewhat panoramic.

I set my reference images up on the adjacent screen to work from.

I started by using a very fine and soft brush tool to sketch out, as best I could the body of my character taking reference from the Iggy Pop photo.

Using the magic wand tool, I very loosely selected sections of the body and in separate layers I coloured them. I did it loose because although I really like the work of Marcos Chin, I wanted to add my own abstract style to my piece.

I then added a layer for the background, placing it behind all of the others. Using reference from the Chin piece I coloured it accordingly, however using different colours as I like to use more vibrancy and noise in my work.

I lined my character using the pen tool and stroke path combination, I added tone, and small details to start to build up the base of my character.

Then, taking inspiration from the Chin piece I used a fine brush on the brush tool to sketch in my interpretation of the plants used on my reference.. in this case I drew a few tattoo style roses. I did this because with me using Iggy Pops body, and the colours, I could foresee this piece having a rock'n'roll style theme.

After drawing the roses, I shaded and blended the surrounding areas.

                                      

I didn't want my roses to be as delicate as the flowers used in Chins piece because i felt it wouldn't fit the theme of mine. So I used a collection of non specific filters to sharpen them, darken them and add more texture to them to bring them forward slightly from the background.

I then played with the Hue, Saturation, Contrast and colours of the image until I found a theme that felt right.

I added certain filters to the body of my character to round off and finish the tone work and detail I had drawn into it.

I then researched jewish symbols and prison style tattoos that i felt were appropriate for my character, I wanted to give the impression of anger, violence and passion so I gave him a WW2 jewish number tattoo on his forearm to show the idea of vengeance.

I knew of a great quote by Ghandi, and I really wanted to incorporate this into my piece so I chose a suitable font, colour and size and placed it somewhere that I felt looked right.

Once I was finished with the main body of my piece I placed it over a background I had created with the gradient tool the frame the piece. 

I am happy with it.