Eric Deschamps

I am pleased to be sharing this image with you today. This digital painting called "Tucked Away" was done by a contemporary illustrator, a fellow student of mine at the Illustration Master Class 2008 and friend named Eric Deschamps. Eric is a young up and coming artist and has done work for Wizards of the Coast, Activision and Upper Deck amongst others. This particular image appears to be in bookcover format based on dimensions and the space left for text that typically is designed into an image to be used for that purpose. Obviously a fantasy piece, this image portrays a young girl, who with her friends and "alien" companions have made a trek through some near earthlike (if not actually earth) forest and have found a mystical bauble of unknown origin and purpose to the reader. The imagery alone, assuming it is to be a bookcover affectively gives the browser alot of information about the contents of this book.
In analyzing the composition of this piece, it is worth noting that the color palette is bright and vibrant and it is obvious that Eric chose it due to the subject matter which relates to young adult fantasy. This genre is often illustrated with this type of palette which help emphasizes youth and youthful vibrance and energy. There are a number of compositional things that make this a very strong image. There is movement created by the diagonals made by the creature's wings, the top of the log and line of the water. A worm's eye viewpoint helps to increase to size and depth of the background space while allowing for a direct focus on the main figure considering she is at ground level. Movement is also created by the curves of the creatures wings, the water rings expanding from the point where her arm meets the water, the floating leaves in the foreground falling to the water and the girl's hair which is being affected by gravity. Eric has used another compositional technique relating to color in which the girl is associated to her creature pal and the glowing bauble by color, a color that is not used anywhere else in the painting. He has also chosen a loose split complimentary color scheme of orange, blue-green and blue violet which in addition to a few analogous colors to this frame color scheme adds strength to the design. Ultimately, this is an extremely strong image due to Eric's obvious attention to design detail and fundamentals. If this image is or becomes an actual book cover, I'll buy it. And I would like to also thank Eric for allowing me to analyze a piece of his art.