Space Princess: Preliminary Sketches

First of all, please pardon how messy and sketchy things are in this post. These are much looser then I'd like to be showing! But I always enjoy peeking into people's minds when they're generating ideas. So I figure it's only fair to bare a bit of mine to you guys! Here are a few doodles I managed to scribble out over the course of the last week while creating ideas for an monthly art challenge with some friends of mine.

We're hoping to produce a piece of art, monthly, based on a random theme. This month the image just had to include a "Space Princess". So while everyone seemed to be interested in drawing pin ups, I decided to take it another direction!


I knew I wanted to my Space Princess to be a little girl. So here you can see some of the many scribbles where I explored what she might look like. I loved the idea of her hair being wild and frizzy. I also thought it was kind of a fun idea to have her hair bunch up and spill out of the bottom of a space helmet. Ha! Still not sure where I'll go with her design completely but these at least helped me understand what direction I'd be moving in.

The little thumbnails included are indicators of the image I sort of had in my head. I thought about doing an angled shot with the two alien guards on either side of her. That way we could see her lording over all of her alien minions below. But I think I'm going to go with the more simplified straight on composition with her thugs at her side. I felt pretty confident about where it was all headed but I wasn't sure what I wanted the aliens to look like.


Which prompted these sketches! During the week, when I had a free moment, I'd scribble out some random design with no real thought other then it needed to be wacky. I just played around with shapes and silhouettes. I kept coming back to tentacles for some reason. I still don't know which one I'm going to choose and push forward in the final illustration. I'd love it if you guys would help me to decide! Leave me a post in the comments with your thoughts! And anything I don't use might make for good starting ideas for some of the aliens in my Zebzulon project! Ha!

As the week goes on I'm going to dive into the illustration and hopefully start painting by the time this weekend gets here! Hope you guys like the messy look into my mind as it tries to rough on ideas! See you again soon!

- Ryan