Composition sketches

I did some composition sketches for my personal project, creating a keyfame for the fairytale "the fisherman and his wife".

If you don't know the story, it is about greed and how wanting more can be a dangerous thing. Also it is about a talking fish! Anyways, I like the tale because it is quite compact and has an interesting development process of both characters and environment.

So after designing a first character (the fisherman) I decided to make composition sketches for the keyframe, following Ryan Lang's tutorial on gumroad.
https://gumroad.com/ryanlangdraws#

Using perspective-lines and a golden-ratio-grid for the composition was something I picked up from the tutorial and it helped so much. Usually I went by gut-feeling, but this time, I forced myself to use my brain instead haha. So I definitely learned something.

At first I thought about putting the whole story into outer-space and I am sure it would have been worthwhile I went for the more traditional approach in the end. I then finish up the best of the sketches.

After that I did 2 color-roughs, to decided on the mood for the picture. I flipped the whole thing horizontally to help the viewer to get into the scene easier. I felt like the fisherman was blocking the picture too much, when he was still on the left side.

I decided to go with the left version, since in the beginning of the story, the sea is calm and the sky is blue and it is the friendlier mood.

Next step will be to design the props and model them in 3D to pose them. This workflow new to me and I will use Blender for it. I have some experience modelling in 3Ds Max, but not much.

Below are a design sheet for the bottle of booze and the bottle in 3D.