Twelfth Night (Malvolio)

Trying to keep to one of my artistic New Year's resolutions, here you have my attempt to do a character illustration for Malvolio from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.  Of course, I have to start off with some preliminary sketches.

Some pre-lim sketches

I knew I wanted a longish rectacular head, and hunched yet gangly body type

I wanted to backwards engineer this a bit.  Malvolio is kind of dour, stick-up-his-butt servant character who is tricked into thinking that his employer (Olivia) is in love with him.  In a falsified note he conveniently finds, Malvolio is prompted to wear yellow stockings and smile in order to please his admirer.  So, of course, prior to this Malvolio must be a frowner, and he has to already be wearing stockings of some kind.  He also goes crazy later on in the play, so I wanted pre-Malvolio to be a very stuffy, buttoned-down kind of guy: tightly tucked shirt, pomade in his hair, etc.  So, when he goes nuts, his clothes can go haywire as well as his hair and his whole demeanor.

Here is when I sketched it out in blue pencil.

and then inked.

At this point, I need to figure out whether I want to add substantially to this sketch with more solid black shadowing or if I want to use watercolors and color it in that way, or if I want to add all color with the computer.  I definitely want color, though.