This is an old Illustration Friday piece that had been rolling around in my head for quite a while. I had done several sketches of this idea, but none of them were quite right to me. I finally nailed it a few weeks ago while pretty aimlessly doodling in front of the boob tube.
Then came the task of coloring the piece, which was another mountain to climb since i think my color sense and color application skills are a bit dubious at best. I know I wanted to go with an unusual color palette; something that didn't reflect normal color expectations of certain elements. For instance, I did not want the fire to be orange and yellow -- that sort of thing. I flatted the piece and fiddled around with color adjustments and saturations in photoshop for a few days until i crafted something with which i was happy. And here you have it!
I have a bunch of these in-progress Illustration Friday pieces, as I can never seem to actually finish them on time. I'm usually working on one from at least a week or two before the current topic.
The idea of extremes must have struck a slightly political chord with me when the topic was announced, no doubt due to some current event that may have been in the news at that time. As some of you may know, i can't stand overtly political art (or music). Therefore, I didn't give this character a recognizable entity as a person or group of people. To me, the word 'extremes' stood for someone who is zealous about an idea or belief. This person is not interested in hearing what others have to say and has no regard for how ridiculous/hateful/obscene/outdated/stupid, etc. their rhetoric may be. Hopefully with that being said, the illustration makes a bit more sense now. I realize that without that pretext, no one may have ever guessed that -- but that's ok. I did just want it to look cool as well. :)
