Development sketches for some new illustrations. It’s still nothing but dragons and horses over here. Not that I’m complaining, my brain has certainly chosen weirder things to fixate on in the past.
Update on the (still unfinished) fanart of Edward Elric from FMA / FMAB (still in process)
I'm still working on this fanart... The first image shows what it's look now and the second image was just a test for the future curves and color balance (my coloring
Here are some of process snapshots of this piece of Astarion in Baldur's Gate.
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!
I don't save stages of work that often, even here there are huge jumps in detail between pictures as you can see, but I genuinely enjoyed drawing the Sniper, so I saved the process more or less