Girl in the iron shoes

“Girl in the iron shoes” by Chris Beatrice
InspirationAs soon as I read “The Enchanted Pig”, I was drawn to its main character – a young woman who undergoes a host of trials in her quest to find her husband (who has been transformed into a pig), and return him to human form. She must wear out three pairs of iron shoes and blunt a steel staff in her travels. She visits the mansions of the moon, the sun and the wind… and even has a baby along the way. With this picture I wasn’t so much trying to tell a story as fuse a variety of disparate elements in a way that would arouse the viewer’s curiosity as to what was going on. The bundle of chicken bones, the knife, the baby, the bandages, the steel staff, the two pairs of metal shoes, all play important roles in the story.The way the girl handles her predicament was what inspired me to do this piece in the first place, and getting her character right was also my biggest challenge.I saw this image pretty clearly right from the start, and banged out a very quick thumbnail to capture it. I wanted to depict the girl striding along with a deliberate, unwavering gait, and a determined look on her face, yet no sign of weakness, fatigue or complaint. She is entirely unfazed by her situation.

Thumbnails
I saw this image pretty clearly right from the start, and banged out a very quick thumbnail to capture it. I wanted to depict the girl striding along with a deliberate, unwavering gait, and a determined look on her face, yet no sign of weakness, fatigue or complaint. She is entirely unfazed by her situation.

Sketches

After the thumbnail I did a larger sketch, still very rough, and surrounded it with some small sketches for a few of the various picture elements. This is my typical way of sketching out a picture – I don’t do a full tight pencil drawing, but rather a very rough, small pencil sketch (around 4-6” tall), and a whole bunch of small drawings to explore different details of the picture. I then use these as reference while I paint the final piece. This gives a certain richness to my final picture, because I constantly crank out little drawings throughout my day, on whatever I have at hand, then go to the computer with a hefty stack of home-made reference material to paint!

Color Rough

I started off with a pretty narrow palette, but moved away from this by the end of the piece. As usual my color rough consisted of a few flat areas of solid color, created in Photoshop using the lasso select and fill tools. The pencil sketch is superimposed as a multiply layer on top, but does not become part of the final picture – the painted colors are all done on a fresh layer (in Painter).
In the final color rough you can see that I tilted the entire picture to give it a more dynamic composition, and also laid out the clouds in a pattern radiating from the mansion of the moon (vaguely visible on the left side of the horizon), to emphasize the girl’s motion and the perspective of the picture. The different light positions I tried can also be seen in the color roughs.

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