Dreamer Preliminary Sketches

Preliminary work I did for the Dreamer illustration. A bunch of thumb sketches and the final drawing. I also used a ton of tracing paper to help me make the poses more dynamic. The guy I did the illustration for had a specific idea in mind and he gave me a rough sketch of what he wanted. His idea was basically the first thumb I did but more zoomed out, which would not have worked because of the horizontal composition. So we agreed on thumb sketch 4. As I was looking for reference, I came across a piece that was quite inspiring and I thought it would work well for this illustration, so I did a couple more sketches and sent them over. He liked the new sketches but wanted the character sitting underneath a tree, so I did 2 more sketches and the first sketch is what we went with.