“Funeral”
An illustration showing a colorful group of interstellar characters mourning a death together.
Watercolor and Ink; May 29th, 2020.
The idea for this piece came from trying to visualize an intimate funeral in a sci-fi setting. What would a funeral look like in space?
I wanted to try doing a painting sketch digitally before tracing it to paper for coloring. I refined the reference from my sketchbook into this. At this stage I also decided to have the composition mirror a cinematic framing aspect ratio.
Here's the pencil lines and masking fluid on paper, ready for ink and color.
I wanted each character to have a unique color to stand out from each other. This funeral unites them; they all knew the deceased. There's also a cartoonish effect of each character having a specific color association: they look like the cast of a sort of Power Rangers story. Are they strangers or a team?
Here's the final after doing some color adjustment post-scanning. I could've done more with the background to make it easier to determine they were in space. At the time I wanted the solid black to accentuate the emptiness of space, but looking back on it I don't think it would've hurt the piece overall to throw some very distant stars in the background.