Aspects of American Realism Final Piece 1 progress

Very nearly finished now! Could even be complete later today so this is a slightly pointless post. I am excited about my school exhibition at the assembly rooms where both AOAR final pieces and my truck will be displayed.

Aspects of American Realism Final Piece 2

This is the second final piece of my realism project, after going off on a black and white tangent of various artists mainly inspired by Frank Miller I decided that my second final piece should also be black and white.

(The 3 images below are digital stages of development and were not drawn unlike the finished piece above)

I wanted to produce a typical 50's mobster image, unfortunately such a scene would be very hard to recreate and photograph.Instead I had to produce my scene digitaly, first I took a photograph of a 50's American car on which the image would be based.

After adjusting the photograph I then had to insert the character, I chose to use the illustration by Frank Miller I had previously studied as it fitted nicely into position in the car with a few small tweaks.

I then used the work of black and white NYC photographers to create a background scene, as I has adjusted all of these images to solid black on white they were fairly straight forward to piece together and create a finalized image from which my finished piece of work would be produced from.

Soon as I had this printed off it was down to producing a final piece, I made it identical in size to my first final piece (33 x 18 1/4 inches). I then had to choose my materials, I wanted to work on paper as it is a smooth surface and means I don't have to paint the white areas. I used fineliners to outline all of the shapes as it is far more controlled than a paintbrush in the hands of myself meaning that I could get precise edges leaving fine lines of white where necessary. Having lined the image out I had left myself with a giant paint by numbers, with only one number, black. I tried a few different paints before hand and found that Gouache paints were best suited as they matched the fine liner and produced a perfect smooth black finish as if printed.