HoND: Mucha-style

Sorry for the rather low quality of the image. I had to take a photo of this since the drawing is a bit too big to fit on my scanner, and I wanted the entire image to be visible. So, everything looks a bit darker and you can see the edges of the paper, since the paper curled a bit from my rigorous use of colored pencils.

This is the final colored version of [link] . Basically, someone noted that one of my drawings looked like art nouveau, specifically Mucha-style, so I went ahead and researched that art style and looked at a few pieces done by Alphonse Mucha. The most inspirational were [link] and [link] and, as you can see, I took Frollo's pose directly from "Hamlet", though he's holding his dagger instead of a sword (it's just a bit hidden behind the sleeves of his robe).

Now to talk about the details in this piece, since it certainly took a lot of thought and planning:

On Frollo's side, there's a noose behind him to represent his duties as a Judge/Minister of Justice, and the flames below him are pretty self-explanatory. On Phoebus' side, the horses behind his head stand for his horse, Achilles, and the sword and arrows below him tell you he is a soldier (plus, he got shot by an arrow). Then the beams of light below him are a nudge to the fact that his name stands for "sun". The roses below Esmeralda were inspired by a photograph of some of the pink roses in one of Notre-Dame's gardens. The sun design behind Esmeralda is from the stage at the Festival of Fools. Behind Quasimodo is the rose window found in Notre-Dame, and the gargoyles on either side are spewing molten lead on the left, water on the right (it coincides with the sides belonging to Frollo and Phoebus). Then the stained glass windows above Frollo and Phoebus' heads feature colors symbolic of/linked to the two characters.

I probably would have added in other characters such as Djali, Clopin, and maybe Victor, Hugo, and Laverne, but I guess I was more interested in this interesting little "triangle" you have involving Frollo, Quasimodo, and Phoebus' attraction towards Esmeralda (and each man has different variations of the same feeling: Frollo's is lust, Quasimodo's is more like awe and affection and something akin to friendship, and Phoebus' is your basic definition of love [and, of course, I'm talking about the Disney movie here, lol]).

This took many days to do, from the lineart, to the inking, to coloring it in. And with each step I had to figure out what to do, whether it was what detail to put in or what colors to choose. And in the end, I am very proud of how it turned out. Definitely one of my most ambitious projects of this year.