The golden army

So if i'm being honest and looking back on my previous result made me incredibly uncomfortable, i'd literally drawn myself as a fucking Nazi, i don't want to have an outcome that both possibly promotes Nazism and at the same time is essentially copying that imagery. It was time to take the outcomes in my own direction, make the project a little more overblown. 

Gold, i want to be a dictator thats obsessed with wealth and displays a lot of gold, going as far as to present myself as a golden deity. For this i got my hands on some gold... paint to use in my work. I start by drawing two alternate versions of myself, one as a pure gold portrayal, and a real world alternative wearing a golden mask. This offers two approaches for imagery that i for sure will be playing with. On top of this i painted the emblem with the gold also and.....

Changed the emblem in the original mono print to an orca gold colour. In honestly i feel the black looked better, but i feel in the long run this design will better fit the future direction of the project.

  

From that, i start on kitting out my army, using the decided colour, and working from my own outfit choices, designing some fancy, kind of daft coats to work next to my own designs emphasis. I tried to place an emphasis on the gold with the helmets, as it is also an important element to the aesthetic. I certainly wouldn't mess with these oddly bright soldiers. There is somewhat of a reason behind them being so bright, having a narrative element that i have such confidence in my army's fighting ability, they have no need to wear camouflage and hide.

Ok, so i've got to use the army in some way, i have to show them off to the public, show them we aren't a force to be reckoned with and that they better cope with it. I thought of a lot of ways to compositionally display myself and the army in a different way. But for all my effort to try and display it in a fancy way, none were as effective as my first idea, just simply showing the army as a mass crowd advancing. That is the idea i'm Going to finalise and refine.

And that i did, a rather successful final-ish outcome. I feel that this image would be right at home in the pages of a comic, but in order to have it be truly taken seriously, i would have to render the image in a somewhat realistic manner. This i'm afraid to say i simply don't have time for at this stage of the project, but not to worry, it gets the idea across and i still have time to make a little something else, now concentrating on that golden deity idea.

For that i found one of my sketches for the previous outcome to be perfect for that, the fifth one to be specific. It featured a large floating version of myself watching over my army. This time i would rather it be more directed towards the public, its my big brother eyes watching them. For this i was thinking that i instead look over a city or the world in place of the soldiers.

And here it is, featuring versions of looking over the world and a city. The city looks far better aesthetically so that is the one i chose. You'll also notice that i decided to render this image, learning from the Golden army outcome and only having select elements that needed doing so. I am very happy with this one, and actually picked up a new skill thanks to it. In order to achieve the rendering i had to look in to and refer to gold as a physical object, in an attempt to represent its reflective elements and texture etc. Its far from a perfect gold effect, but its progress and something i will certainly work on after the project.