This is a painting depicting a character from a popular children's show from the early 2000's, Digimon Frontier. The show is very kid friendly, though it has some darker moments thrown in. Most of the art for this show are bubbly and friendly. I wanted to show some of the darkness with it, with none other than the warrior of Darkness himself.
Below are several steps - mostly times when I copied and created new layers - for this piece.
This was a quick sketch of the general shape I wanted the foremost figure to have. A reference was used to get the foreshortening correct on the leg in the back.
Here the face in the background has been quickly sketched in. I momentarily played with the idea of making it a closer cut with the figure and turning it into a portrait. I decided against it because I felt walking towards the 'camera' would be considerably more creepy.
The shape of the clothes has been added in over the first sketch on a separate layer. I was having difficulty finding a shape to use for the hand, so I created a new layer and used my own hand as reference to simply draw it in without using a general shape as a guide.
The face and details of the figure have been cleaned up, and the background face has been drawn in more precisely. At this point, considering I was going for a painted look and not a cell-shaded look, I considered the line art finished and moved on to coloring.
The colors have been roughly placed to get an idea of the values I wanted to use.
Satisfied with the colors I had placed, I moved on to shading and adding details. This step always takes me the longest. It would take me perhaps an hour to get the first steps before this completed depending on how detailed the clothing and poses are. This step could take up to 10 hours, though for this imagine I'm not entirely sure how long it took. Towards the end, I was growing antsy with the phase and did not spend as much time on the shoes as I could have. I decided I didn't need to since they would not be as visible when I added in the finishing details.
Now we have the finished image with the finished details added. There was a smoke effect added, some shadows darkened up, some small highlights added here and there, and a glow effect added to the main figure's face.
Over all, the piece took me anywhere from 10 - 13 hours to complete. I did not keep track of the time as precisely as I normally would have as I spent several days on it, which is not my norm. I generally tend to sit down and do an entire painting in one day, even though most my paintings can take around 10 hours or more for completion.
