Applied Illustration: Developing Persephone

After talking to my group, I came to the decision to propose 4 comic books, each based on a modernised retelling of a classic greek mythological story. 
To start with I'm just going to create the one story and then propose what I would do for the next 3. 
The story I decided to experiment further with was Persephone as it was one of my favourite stories and it also has a limited amount of characters (if it was going to be small I don't want to have to create loads of characters). 




I started by drawn classical persephone, after looking at some references on Pinterest. However I quickly decided to start drawing her in a more modern way. I tried to think of what job she would have, as her and her mother are widely regarded as nature/fertility gods I thought it was fitting to have her in some gardening attire, with her job potentially to be working at a garden centre. I tried to make her more modern by cutting off her flowing locks and giving her a pixie cut. I kept drawing until I hit a version of Persephone I liked. As I'd been looking into lots of 1950s fashion of that late (just in my personal development, not for any particular project) I started drawing her in late 50's clothes. I really liked the idea of setting Persephone in the 1950's and keeping the rest of the comic books in a different era- 70's 80's 90's. (I decided to ask on the next mega crit day). 

I then started to design the other three characters in that kind of fashion style and think about how they would move and act in accordance to it. I also started to think about the story, in classical greek mythology, Persephone is lusted after by apollo and hermes after her mother Demetra boasts about her beauty, she is then captured (and in some texts raped) by hermes, who then keeps her in the underworld half of the year (winter) before letting her back to earth with her mother (summer). Although I liked the classic story, I made a note to ask my crit group how they would feel if I changed the story in favour of Persephone, perhaps having her saved by Hades rather than captured by him? 


I kept experimenting with the ink and after looking at Jen Lee's work, decided that a limited colour palette was something I wanted to keep in mind whilst creating this work. I enjoy working with ink, but it wasn't quite bright enough so I thought about perhaps trying gouache at some point. I started to draft what I wanted the pages to look like, in hotdog format before going to my crit group to ask their opinions on my revised proposal.