Inspired by others posting "making of" threads here, I'd thought I'd also put up some WIP images of an ongoing project I've spent some hours on today. The Ray of Light image is a stab at lighting realism. It features one of my recurring characters, the Jester. I'll only briefly sum up the changes to each step here, I might make a more full tutorial later. This is all WIP, so the lighting is by no means consistent yet. If you have any questions or feedback though, just take it away. This is using Krita, but the techniques would work the same in GIMP or MyPaint.


Initial sketch, placing the masses and rough gestures. I usually use ley figures to get a feel for a pose, but ley figures are very unflexible, especially in the hips - some poses are simply not possible. I found a very cool Android app called Pose tool that offers anatomical pose reference with a lot more flexibility than ever possible in a real-world ley figure. It's a good portable amatomical reference. It's not open source though, alas. It costs $4. An open-source alternative which I've used a lot is makehuman. This is intended as a way to make human models for Blender and other 3D renderers, but it also works fine as a powerful artistic pose reference.


Establishing the volumes. Note that I start with the background and light already at this stage. Things are still very rough.


First version, with rough lighting. In the following I did some experiments with colors (This is done with a HSV color layer above the painting, then airbrushing the colours in place). . Still not decided on any of them, so I'm working on this set for now.


Alternative color #1 - Colder light. Gives a harsh feel.


Alternative color #2 - Warmer light. This feels rather fantasy-esque. Maybe less realistic though, and maybe suggesting a warmer climate.


Alternative color #3 - Contrasting Cold/Warm foreground. I like how this makes the characters clearly separate. It also gives some symbolism to the image. If used one should use a more subtle palette than this though.


Starting to establish the characters more.


Felt the image needed more people to respond to the Jester, so added a woman + child. Shifted and rescaled the men quite a bit to make everything fit. Also refined the background, ad-libbing a statue and a city wall.


Current status. Still a long way to go. I'll need to adjust anatomy further but otherwise I think I'm ready to start detailing the faces at this point.

I'll update this post as I continue.
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Griatch

griatch: thanks for sharing this, it's fascinating to see how other people work and i look forward to seeing this picture completed .

Interesting! I think the Jester's head is a bit small, but I'm used to drawing very big heads so that could just be preference. xD

Make sure you make that puppet as cute as always!

I find it's a lot of fun myself to see how others go about things.

@Moko
I'll revise the anatomy some more, we'll see if I change the head at some point. I'm aiming for realistic proportions after all.
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Griatch

It's always interesting and useful to see how other artists work. This is looking really good Griatch.