BBC's Sherlock

In my usual predictable manner, I got sidetracked from my art to-do list and found myself inspired by a decidedly different genre series - BBC's Sherlock. My sister had a coworker who had recommended the show to her, so one Saturday she sat down and started watching the first episode. As I was in the room with time to kill, I watched it with her. 

And, just like that, we were hooked.

I had no idea this series was popular (or just HOW popular, which I continue to discover). We paced ourselves pretty well watching our way through the first season (each season is three episodes, 1 and a half hour each), then the second - but after the cliffhanger of the last episode of the second season our self control pretty much collapsed. We binge watched the third season like the crazy fan girls we had become, and now are left anxiously waiting like the rest of the giant fan base for the unknown season 4 air date(there was a 2 year hiatus between seasons 3 and 4, so you can't blame the fans for being worried).

I honestly tried to avoid doing a Sherlock fan art . . . but when I got the idea for this piece I gave in.

It started out as a pencil drawing. A pencil drawing that taught me a very important lesson - it's a REALLY bad idea to attempt a realistic piece of artwork based on a badly printed reference photo. Lesson learned (hopefully I will be buying a tablet soon which would be wonderful to use as a drawing reference instead of having to worry about print quality, but I digress). So this became a pencil drawing that I did a LOT of digital painting over top of in Photoshop. Luckily my ability to fix photos can also be applied to fixing horrible art mess-ups.

When I finished fixing up the drawing, I also added a texture to Sherlock's hat and tinted the hat brown - to put a little extra emphasis on it (that will make sense in the context of the finished overall piece). Here's the finished portrait:

I spent way too many days/hours perfecting this drawing. Which still isn't perfect, but I'm at least to a point where I'm happy with how it looks.

After finishing the portrait portion I then moved on to the design of the overall piece that I wanted to create. I usually just find stock online to use for textures (such as splatters) but for this piece I decided I wanted to make my own. And I learned a lot about making splatters. Sure, now there's red watercolor paint across my ceiling, but the end result was perfect.

Add some text and some tinting and ta-dah!!

The quote this piece is based on is from a conversation between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson about the strange hat that has unintentionally become his trademark:

Sherlock:  “Is it a cap - why’s it got two fronts?”
John:  “It’s a deerstalker.”
Sherlock:  “How do you stalk a deer with a hat? What are you going to do, throw it? Some sort of death frisbee?”

I laughed out loud at "death frisbee," especially since the actor mimicked throwing the hat as he said it. And now, my love of that strange conversation can visually live forever.

~m.d.