Top: the original sketch
Bottom: the final illustration
(click to open full-size)
When I started on the watercolor painting, I decided to change the bear's mood. Instead of being enraged and feral, I thought it would be funnier if he were eager and excited at the prospect of being next, and at the same time completely oblivious to the terror he is instilling. In general, I prefer to make animals innocent and slightly dumb. Bears are very curious animals and they aren't vicious except to defend themselves. The expression I ended up with, I think captures his personality a bit better. In the sketch, he has a mindless rage, but in the final piece, I think his eyes communicate the concept that he is thinking in his tiny brain about fish.
The original sketch was done without much thought. Just moving the pencil around and seeing what happened. For the painting, I went back and drew with more formal construction and composition. I wanted to get the proportions and coloring correct, as well as get the perspective a bit better. The bear in the sketch is just "a bear", as opposed to the specific species in the final painting. I used references. Grizzlies have a very distinctive dish-shaped face and long piglike snout. They also have a more yellowish color than other bears.
Since the grizzly palette is pretty much a fixed commodity, the background colors had to play off the foreground. I knew it would have to be less saturated and more washed out to help the sense of depth. However, I also wanted certain colors to pop out, like the reds of the ticket dispenser, the tuna belly and the salmon filets.
I tried to put more thought into the composition of the final piece. The fish counter guys in the sketch don't have any relationship to each other. In the final, the poses accomplish two things: they give more interest because they are communicating with each other. They also bring the eye back to the bear through the direction of their eyes. Ultimately you have a triangle of interest, with the "now serving" box at the top, the ticket dispenser on the bottom, and the bear's face on the left. Pretty much everything you need to know is contained within that triangle. It also means that the area with maximum detail is centered around that triangle. I thought about putting more elements into the background to the left and above the bear (like ceiling lights and other grocery store shelves), but I decided not too so as not to compete with the area of interest.
Ultimately I would have preferred to have left myself enough space to fill the display case with more fish. Instead I cheated with the signs.
