#artprocesses

I am a messy painter and I often adjust and change the designs as I paint. (Mostly because I don't have the patience to do proper line art haha)

I start out with a rough sketch, I usually sketch ideas out on my ipad and move to my cintiq to work with colors.

Next I block in rough color thumbnail. I keep this part messy as I just want to figure out the value structure and the overall mood.

At this point, I have collected a myriad of screenshots and reference images from the game, pinterest, and also from artists work that inspires me.

With the references on one screen, I start to paint the details, I work from foreground to midground to background. (Sometimes I'll bounce between the depth when I get bored from painting one thing for too long)

Sometimes after I block in the colors I'll make adjustments. I didn't like how warped the perspective was getting on the building on the screen right side, so I adjusted the vanishing point and added more tiers to the design. I went back into the game and looked at more how the stairs were designed and figured it out more thoroughly with a sketch on on top.

I think sitting down and doing the details is the most time consuming part. I still want the focus to be on the character despite all the detail going on the background. At this point I'm toggling on black & white filters constantly to check the value, grouping everything in the background together, making sure the lighting frames the subject in focus. At this point I realized, I forgot to paint Astarion's hair LOL, and that the bg was getting a bit too detailed, so I used a more textured brush and painted away some of the edge details of bg buildings.

Last, I make final adjustments, and I make a overall lighting/fx adjustment folder. Adding in some noise, adjusting the contrast, color balance, and lighting over all and call it done!

So I started out with a sketch of Raphael. He's got such a charismatic swagger doing the whole "What's better than the Devil you don't know? The devil you do" scene. I just wanted to do a caricature study and have a bit of fun.

Moving from rough sketch to clean line art is always challenging for me as I often get bored or what was originally loose and fun can become stiff.

I had to redo the linework twice because I didn't like how the first one turned out! Second time is always the charm.

I initially only planned to draw the character but I love the design of House of Hope too much, so I went back into the game and took a bunch of screen shots and sketched out the rough bg.

Then I went ahead and cleaned up the bg. At this point is when I group the layers properly, so there is a clear separation between foreground, and background as well setting up the layers for animation. (Making sure the fireplace guards overlaps the walls behind it.)

At the next stage I adding in the flat colors. I wanted to keep the style treatment of this piece more on the cell shaded/cartoony instead of super painterly. So I keep the color treatment fairly flat with a small amount of texture with the intention to add lighting as a fx overlapping treatment instead of painted in.

I work on the characters and the bgs at the same time to keep the values and color temp consistant, constantly adjusting as I go. From habit from work, I always paint the entire BG JUST incase I need to make changes or make adjustments to subject in from. Here is the bg all done, with fire painted in as a place holder.

And finally, adding the final lighting layers added on Raphael. I keep it simple here, just a redish/purple multiply player with the areas in the light masked out, and inverse mask on an orange/red overlay layer of the areas in the light.