[Drawing] The Mural

For this final drawing project, I partnered with Jack and Arron, who I've worked with on previous projects and know I can work well with. The goal was to create five characters each for a huge joined mural between the class, not too dissimilar from one of our early projects, which had us creating a view of a street with all of our contributions to the buildings and characters.
Before the big drawing started, we got a lot of reference poses through the use of life drawing sessions. A selection of these drawings can be found below:

 This sheet of Steve includes a face rotation, similar to that in the earlier sessions this year. In comparison to the start of the year, my facial construction has improved a lot and now has more consistency to it. For the poses below, we drew both a rough sketch and a five minute complete drawing. I kept finding myself more satisfied with the rough sketch at time, this may be because my OCD for detail didn't have time to kick in, so I was putting more focus onto getting the drawing down.

 Some more drawings from this session. This was one of my off days where I couldn't get everything down, and I was very dissatisfied with some of my drawings, particularly the one on the bottom right.

From our final session, we had a variety of poses to put into the mural, ranging from death falls to sneaking around. I didn't manage to get the full body across in these four minute sketches, so I focused on the key areas and gesture lines.
The next step was to plan out section of the mural. Jack, Arron and I all drew 5 poses each and I edited a test composition together in Photoshop, which can be seen  below:

There is a clear circle of action in this image, which allows the viewer to follow the motion, although Arron wasn't present in the first mural session, and someone drew in his space, so our original composition had to be changed in the final product. The characters I drew were wearing Roman Armour, which I researched online into different variant styles. Close-ups of the original paper versions are below:

The next step was to transfer these characters onto the mural. We decided to get in first and claim the right hand side of the picture. The lineart for the entire mural can be seen below, after being pencilled and Indian inked:

Due to the coordination being poor early on, there were a lot of perspective issues in the drawing, some people in the foreground were much smaller than background characters. After the first session ended, Will and I stayed behind to fix this issue by adding a cliff background, where platforms could be used to fix perspective issues. We also left a large space in the middle where a war zone was later placed in the background to add a sense of depth.
With the line art complete, the next stage of the picture was to coat the mural in a layer of charcoal and erase the light. We had multiple light sources to base this off, from a volcano in the background to a burning village behind my Romans. The final mural can be seen below:

To finish, here's a selection of photos taken across the creation of the mural:

To summarise, the mural went pretty well to me, I'm happy with the sections I worked on, including my own characters, helping decorate others and padding out the backgrounds. There were some hiccups along the way with perspective and shading issues, but I think I can say I pulled my weight in tying all these back together for the final project. This group project was extremely fun and rewarding to create, sure enough there were some silly areas in the mural, but hey, we're all cartoony folk, what's an arrow to the butt joke going to do along the way?
With the mural complete, I thoroughly enjoyed my Coke in a coconut.