This is the second of a series of posts about how I came to a final piece. In this case the piece in question is "Trojan" which is based on an old school Nintendo game of the same name. It was one of the first games that I played (non stop I might add) and I wanted to do more of a tribute piece to it.
I wanted to try and really do a good job with this one, building on the mistakes that I picked up from the the last piece, with coloring and lighting and so on.
So as always I worked a lot on composition and figuring out what worked best in terms of shapes and arrangements (below). I would take a day or so to work on this and tried different arrangements until I was happy with a potential sketch.
Next comes the scan into Photoshop. I would then get the piece ready for the draw-over and the toning and shading parts. (below). In general I was happy with the general composition and did a lot of research and used a lot of reference to come up with the final drawing.
I would then start to add tones and start to
Then I started to add the values. The last time around I would kind of glance over the drawing value stage with the assumption that I would be able to fix it in the paint over stage. However I realized that if you don't have good values and established lighting up front, then you will have to work harder later on to fix things and your painting won't look right. So I spent a lot more time on figuring out the lighting and the light source. (below)
I then started coloring (below). I generally first try and pick a color scheme using this site that I found on another blog called "color scheme designer".
http://colorschemedesigner.com/.Then I start from the center and then work outwards.
I kept working outward until everything had a general color that I felt would serve as a good base. I usually call this my color flat layer (below)
I then painted over everything on a new layer trying to cover all of the lines, while maintaining the color scheme and the lighting structure. (below)
Next I would work on hilighting the moon and the parts of the painting that are high reflection areas (below)
From there I then add general lighting and try and add atmosphere to the painting. you will also notice that I put in a glow for the moon, the armor the shield as well as the main villain "Achilles" which was the main villain in the game. (below) The final step is to also add a layer of purple to the entire drawing to give the whole thing a sense of atmosphere and color. I would do this by adding a new layer to the entire flattened drawing and then erasing away the color layer. It helps to brighten the drawing and to also add some flavor as well.
The last step is to add a signature and any final touches and voila! Done! See ya next time!
