Duel at midnight B/W studies.

We will return to our regularly scheduled program of ponies in a bit, but I thought folks might find the process of how I go about creating a major finished piece of work. For this I decided walk you through a commission from a few years ago. It was from the same client who commissioned "Defending the Princess" [link] and the main male character from that piece [link] makes a return in this picture. He does seem to be quite a time traveling fellow. Wonder if he's met that Doctor fellow?

The setting for this swashbuckling picture is nighttime on a bridge in 17th century France. I don't know if our hero just accidentally encountered some of Cardinal's Guard and this fight erupted. Maybe it was a trap and he thought he was rendezvousing with another party. Perhaps a lover? Perhaps a compatriot? Either way he has been attacked. Or it could've been an arranged duel and now nake steel flies in a struggle of life and death!

When I decide to a picture there are usually several questions that will jump up in my mind. One of them is how correct and accurate do I want the piece to be. How historically precise do I or client want the piece to be. In this case the client was interested in something a bit more Hollywood so I kept that in mind while working on the piece.

After several e-mails I had an idea of what the client wanted and I started assembling the necessary components to make the picture possible. Fortunately I have good reference in own library for the English Civil War era that could be adapted to piece. So it would be a matter of working out the characters appearing in the piece, but almost more important would be the composition and location/ environment for which they would fighting in.

Since it was suppose to be a swashbuckling picture I decided on a very cinematic look to the composition. After many pages of rough thumbnail sketches I came upon two possible candidates. One was low angle looking up, and the other was an overhead view. I thought it might be neat to tighten the focus up and bring the viewer in closer to the action, but the client decided they wanted the viewpoint pulled back to show all of the figures. So it was on to character design.