meeting Silvia Dimitrova.

Due to me feeling a bit lost with my pre production work i decided to go visit an artist who has been creating religios icons for years. all of her work is incredibly detailed and vibrant.
When i arrived i was pretty nervous i brought my sketchbook along to show her what i had been doing so far with my character designs but being surrounded by all her work was pretty daunting. However Silvia was so lovely and welcoming.
After looking through her portfolio and explaining what my project was about and what i needed to achieve she flicked through my sketchbook to see what i had been doing. the first thing we talked about was the character designs.

In all i was surprised as to how much she liked my character designs. she said i seemed to have to a fair amount of icon detail in my characters and that they would be appealing to kids. Silvia commented on the eyes explaining that they were perhaps a bit too big for the traditional icons facial features.

 However i had done well with looking at the structure of the nose face shape and especially the hair. She was happy to see that i had put a lot of thought into the hair detail. One thing that she pressured me into re thinking about is the detail of the folds in the clothing.

In all icon paintings the clothing is to be incredibly detailed and vibrant. Silvia also mentioned to me about colour. I was worried that for my Nix character i as using colours that weren't found much in icon paintings.

 I thought from researching into icons they used more earthy colours such as reds, browns, greens, yellow etc but Sivlia explained to me that true earth colours were commonly found but they did enjoy using vibrant colours such as purple and vibrant greens and blues. However the main colour that has to be displayed in my work is gold! gold leaf is featured in all russion icon works

Whilst i was drawing out some rough concept pieces i also found myself getting incredibly confused with how to draw out trees, shurbs, rocks mountains and water. luckily Silvia had the perfect book to help me out.

This book is called Pahela. its pretty much the icon painting bible! it holds refrences on how to draw everything from rocks and mountains to waves, clouds and how to draw characters and their clothing.