How the F*** I Managed to Turn an Egg into a Knight - 'Shell' Process + File

Hello everyone,

Here is the process video, file, and brief insights of SHELL, my latest illustration. These kinds of articles are often split into two parts: the concept, where I share the idea behind the piece, and the execution, where I explain the technical aspects like shapes, colors, and value choices. I hope you find this useful; have a great read.

Concept

I took an egg cracked as a reference because I thought it was something very casual that everyone has interacted with at least once in their life. I just was not clear what to do with it, so I moved on in search of other references. 

While exploring, I found a pic of very fancy cutlery. My immediate thought was to translate that reference into knights, but I did not have an interesting story to tell, and that kind of cutlery is rarely found in everyone's house. So I kept searching and eventually found a butter bar cut. I thought it would be nice to have a character cut, if I had found a pic of butter with the aluminum lining, it would make a great case for a crippled knight. But it turned out I remembered the egg, and it actually made more sense to make a character like the inside of an egg and the eggshell as its armor. That was my thought process to come up with this idea, a bit weird indeed.

My list for this concept looked like this:

• Color: White, yellow, light brown
• Ref: Egg
• Action: She is putting on her prosthetic arm/armor (shell). Sad face, melting like an egg white.
• Costume: Knight armor

Execution

In terms of shapes, I did a quick stroke exploration to set the character's gesture. I imagine her sitting while attaching her prosthetic arm to her limb. I pictured this scene with lots of blue tones, since most of the references found share a bluish/green reflection of the sky and grass in the armors of knights, so I thought it made sense.

I used lines to refine the gesture and make clear her facial expression. I also added a few extra props around her just to add some extra levels of information. My favorite is where she is sitting, which was supposed to be wood but eventually shifted towards an old architectural rock like ruins, that resemble the shape of an egg box.

When the whole thing was about 80% done, I noticed that indeed the character looked like a knight and it had eggshell-shaped symbols, still, it did not feel like an eggshell. I figured I needed to adjust the color tone to light brown and change the color of the shadow from blue to warm tones, this helped create the connection between the armor and eggshell.

Here is an interesting fact about eggshells. The strength of an eggshell is quite remarkable when considering its relatively thin structure. The shell is made mostly of calcium carbonate, which is a strong and brittle material. The shape of the egg, being an arch-like structure at both ends, also contributes to its strength. This shape distributes pressure evenly over the entire surface, allowing the egg to withstand considerable forces when pressure is applied evenly. In fact, the design principles of the egg's structure are often studied and applied in architecture and engineering for creating strong yet lightweight materials. The eggshell and knight armor both share a common principle: providing protection through a combination of material properties and design. While knight armor uses metal to protect against external forces, the eggshell uses its composition and shape to protect the life developing inside it, making it a marvel of natural engineering.

Conclusion

Art is interesting; you start with a simple idea and eventually evolve it into something absolutely different. The value in this journey is to find out what things opposite ideas have in common and find interesting ways to translate these similarities into symbols, clear enough that the artist can understand them and, hopefully, others as well. Does that make sense?

Thanks for your support.