Space Girl

Here's another space girl from the Trinquette challenge.

Here's the final:

The original sketch.  I was pretty happy with this.

The colors changed the flow quite a bit.

Here's the first pass. Her jaw felt a little too square in this one.

This was a candidate final:

Here's a closeup of her face.

As I stared at this one of the things I realized was that I didn't have enough contrast in my color values.  So I took another pass at darkening the skin.  I also tried a different background color:

The background color wasn't quite doing it for me though.  It brought out her skin tones nicely, but it also seemed to compete with it.  So for the final I went back to the blue.

Recline

Here are some shots from the latest Trinquette Alternate Challenge.



The final piece.

The original sketch

A facebook-safe verison.

Slave (Trinquette Challenge April 20)

Just a quickie post here.  More details later.

And here's the Facebook-safe version.

Here are the finished pencils.  I actually like the pencils much better, which suggests this probably needs a repaint/recolor.

Dejah View

This is another commission, but I kind of went over the top with it.  Unfortunately I forgot to export more in-progress pictures, so you'll have to do with the sketches.

Here's the final version.

This is the first rough, just getting basic shapes.  I used a photo ref for the base pose.

I was trying to figure out what to do with her front leg as the pose seems a little unnatural.  Though what I was trying to do was even more unnatural.  So I just went back to the photo.

Here I'm trying to clean up her eyes by redrawing from scratch, but they completely lost their character.

So I went back to the original eyes.  Gotta love layers!  And added the background.

The painting was done on about 20 layers.  For each element usually a flat color, then various lighting/shading layers on top.

COMMISSION: Lauren and Tara

This was a commission for Aidenke's (http://aidenke.deviantart.com/) characters Lauren and Tara.

This is the final.

And a peek at the process.  Here's one of the first ideas.

This one was my favorite.  It's both erotic and playful.  But Aidenke wanted a side view.

So this is a pretty late stage sketch side view.  For some reason I've been having a lot of problems with profiles lately, so I changed the seated figure's face quite a lot.  The girl on top's face came really quickly though.

At first I started coloring using my standard chalk brushes, but it didn't seem to fit the picture and pencils.  The colors ended up looking really messy and too gritty.  So I threw them all out and started from scratch with a more comic-book coloring approach.  This seemed to work better.

Breakfast at Elvira's

Happy Halloween, folks!

This one came pretty quickly, but I ended up with a lot of face changes, partly because things just didn't look good.


This is the original idea, just trying to figure out what pose to use.  At this point the Breakfast at Tiffany's idea wasn't in place.  But the pose on the left reminded me of the Robert McGinnis poster so...

A second sketch of the basic pose after finding a puny poster reference.

And now a little better, with better proportions.  Proportions is probably my biggest challenge.

Here's the first color job.  I tried to keep it mostly flat like that poster.

I really didn't like her face, and the cat tail kind of interfered with the little dagger/cross thing.  So I ended up trying a bunch of different tail configurations, settling on this one for it's slightly silly sexy humorous element.  Also added the tagline.

Her nose and mouth just did not read well.  It seemed OK large, but when scaled, it kind of fell apart.  I believe this is the latest version on Facebook.

 I decided the skin coloring was too dark and making her look dirty, so I reduced the opacity of the layer.  Also made her nostrils flare more, which makes her look more like herself.

And this is a full res version.  Zoom it and you can see how the likeness is much better.  I suspect the problem is not so much with scaling but with my painting skills...

Please be mindful of beavers

Here's the latest bit of silliness.  This was a collaboration with LLToon.

He gave me this base pose and proportions:

This is the first outline based on that.  I knew I wanted a creature, but didn't quite know what yet, nor what it looked like.  At first, the default was a bunny, then a Stitch-like alien, mostly I wanted someone gleefully doing something.  The beaver came out on top for obvious reasons of bad taste.  At this point I think I only had the beaver holding on to something...not sure what.

And then of course, it dawned on me: bra straps are like reins!  Here's the final pencils.

And the first finished colors.  It took a while to get the wording right.  I knew I wanted some kind of pseudo public service message.  At first the sign said "Please don't bring your beaver clothes shopping."  and "Keep animals wild.  Please dont' feed them."  But that seemed too direct and at the same time nonsensical.  After trying a number of different approaches, this one seemed most appropriate.

I thought I was done, but as usual, the small size brought out some issues that I wasn't quite aware of.  I had to tweak the contrast a bit to make the shapes pop a little more.  Also the black text was disappearing into the gray background.

And one more color background variation: