The Lion Of Caliban: Making Banners part 1

I wanted to write an update of what i've been working on today. I've had some interest in the banner I created for Apollyon and, since I enjoyed creating it so much, I decided to  create another for my Librarian.

The first thing I do is gather images. This is one of my favourite activities when working on a project. I'm gathering images, quotes and music that inspire me all the time; and when I stumbled upon this old artwork by John Blanche, I knew I'd use it at sometime in the future:

At this point I had no real theme in mind. I liked the image, and it felt right to use with this model.

The initial sketch is very rough. I'm working on shapes, proportion and working in any detail that catches the eye. I'm not really concerned with the final outcome, i'm just trying to cram interesting information into my brain to use in the next sketch. 

I had a lion's head, but not much else. I knew from my previous attempt at creating a banner, highly detailed images do not lend themselves well to such a small scale. I decided to have a broken blade protruding from the mouth of the lion, and winged background to frame the head.

Below, we can see a rough sketch (on the right) trying to fit all the images I wanted to use. This time I draw to scale, to make sure the Lion's head, broken Blade and Winged motif is not too complicated. 

For this last step I concentrate on technique, form and composition. I measure out the gaps between the feathers, mark the central point of the banner and construct the lion head around the broken sword. I decided to elongate the mouth beyond what is biologically possible to reinforce the nightmarish qualities of the beast. The banner is now ready for painting! 

I'll run this through the scanner and put a download on my website if anyone would be interested in this design for their own Dark Angels (or any other chapter; there is no specific mark on there).  Please leave a comment below if you wish to have this available as a download, or whether you would like to see any other banner designs. 

LilLoser