Cellan, Allie and the Jester

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Empheba
Posts: 102
Joined: Fri Aug 19, 2011 9:53 am

Sun Aug 26, 2012 12:14 pm

Image

From the left:
The Jester (my character)
Princess Allie (carrying the sister of Mrs Buttons) and Queen Cellan (characters of the player Cellan here at TI).

All character rights belong to their respective players of course. This is just a fun fan artwork study.


Technically, this was mostly an experiment with light and shadow, which meant a lot of partial studies and retries. Also did a few revisions in collaboration with Cellan to get all faces just right. :)


GIMP + Mypaint, from scratch over some 18 hours I think. I will post a few WIP images below (since I happen to have them sitting on my drive anyway).
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Empheba
Last edited by Empheba on Sun Aug 26, 2012 4:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Empheba
Posts: 102
Joined: Fri Aug 19, 2011 9:53 am

Sun Aug 26, 2012 1:15 pm

WIP images.

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Initial, cleaned, sketch for the poses. Not that Allie is very, very small here. This was me not properly looking at the big picture. :) I scaled her up later.

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Initial sketch for clothes, on top of the anatomical studies.

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The study for the gowns with harder outlines. Once can see I'm more familiar with designing the Jester - that hasn't changed much from the initial sketch whereas Allie and Cellan are still quite rough.

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First colour rough, with crude faces. I initially had this ridiculously large hairdo planned for Cellan, along with some sort of veil hanging down her back. It sticks around for a while before being scrapped (and her hair got progressively lower and lower).

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First rough study of faces. No, I know this looks nothing like the final result. My first intention was to have Allie look a bit shy and "skeptical" of the jester, which also why the jester has such a passive "non-frightening" stance in this image. Cellan's massive hairdo got a bunch of ribbons and her dress got more fleshed out.

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First background study. Notice the size - I had to do this in order to get perspective lines in place. But already at this point my plan was to crop this heavily down the line.

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More elaborate faces. The jester is pretty much finished. This is the first version of Cellan which I later came to think felt looked too old (and not at all like the images Cellan has of her character). Her hair has however already gotten a bit smaller. Allie still has the "skeptical" attitude here.

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First on-person shadow study. Note that the shadows are very simple still at this point - just plain crosses. Also there is no actual counter-light but things are kept very "bright" and evenly lit despite the shadows. Note also the shadows on Cellan's dress which I really liked, but which were cut out completely in the final crop.

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I repositioned Allie's hand a bit and lost her skeptical attitude to make her more cheerful. I felt this fit the relationship between the Jester and the princess better.

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Nearly finished (unlit) version of the Jester's face. I did make her face slightly shorter in the final version though.

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Final "first" version of Cellan. Had this not been meant to represent an existing character I would probably have gone with this. As it were, I cane to change this a lot more than I changed the Jester or Allie.

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First sketch for the full window spruce pattern.

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Better integrated window pattering. It's still very rough though. To continue properly from here we need to establish lighting much better.

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Initial ambient light study with partial on-character shadows. Note that the floor is starting to get proper shadowing. The tricky thing here is to make their faces and poses come across in an easy-to-read way despite all those shadows (realistically) playing over them.

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Cleanup. The puppet is was also added.

At this point I went into detailing mode, which is not very interesting to look at, so I only took a few snapshots along the way. This is a lot of work.

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Final crop. All the stuff outside the frame were thrown away.
In this snapshot, texturing of clothes and floor are finished as well as a lot more work on the background foilage. I had this idea that while Cellan is primarily blue and the Jester primarily red, Allie should represent a sort of colour middle-way between them. In the end I removed much of this effect though since it looked too colourful and "caramel" like.

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Backlighting shadows added. The image-flip is not permanent, I do it all the time to make sure anatomy (in this case, faces) are not messed up.

I did a truck load of modifications on this, including desaturating the colours considerably. It was hard to find any particular interesting spot to take screenshots of. So here we jump to the final results.

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Final face of the Jester. Note how the cap has gotten more texture and that overall image is more desaturated. This is also after some feedback from Cellan (thanks!) about her looking a bit too reserved before, so her eyes are more open here, creating a more inviting expression.

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Final face of Allie. Her eyes were re-focused a bit and her cheeks and nose were reworked quite a bit. Also the back of her head was shrunk a bit as part of reviewing the anatomy.

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Completely re-worked face of Cellan. This looks younger, and after some input from Cellan herself does look reasonably like she pictured her (I have to take her word on this of course ;)). Technically I re-aligned the face quite a lot and lowered the hairdo a final step so as to not give her quite as large a forehead as before.

Final image can be seen in the previous post. Hope it was fun to follow!
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Empheba

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Kinaed
Posts: 1984
Joined: Wed Jan 05, 2011 8:54 pm
Discord Handle: ParaVox3#7579

Sun Aug 26, 2012 11:15 pm

Incrediable :) And wow, 18 hours - spread over how long?

I love the windows and what they look like, and I'm always impressed with your skill in reproducing the same character over and over. Can I ask what training and tutorials/resources you've used to advance your art? Honestly, I know you told me once this was a hobby, but as hobbies go, your work is highly professional.

I wish I had enough interaction with you to get you to do one of my characters, hehe! :)

With love,
Kinaed

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Empheba
Posts: 102
Joined: Fri Aug 19, 2011 9:53 am

Mon Aug 27, 2012 2:43 pm

Kinaed wrote:Incrediable :) And wow, 18 hours - spread over how long?

I love the windows and what they look like, and I'm always impressed with your skill in reproducing the same character over and over. Can I ask what training and tutorials/resources you've used to advance your art? Honestly, I know you told me once this was a hobby, but as hobbies go, your work is highly professional.

I wish I had enough interaction with you to get you to do one of my characters, hehe! :)

With love,
Kinaed
Thanks!

This was spread out over three weekends or so I think, mostly because I have very little time to actually spend working on a piece in a row.
I have painted in oils and charcoal for a long time, so that's where I got the basics I guess. I switched to work on the computer about ten years ago or so (smells less in a small student apartment :-)). It remains just a hobby though, it's nice to do something else than what I normally do (science).

I think the main way to improve for me has been to request and receive harsh critiques on my images from various art forums online. Learning to absorb critique without being let down by it is probably the fastest and most effective way to improve. I also try to experiment and not stick with only things I know, such as trying tricky anatomy, light and perspective in various combinations. This often leads to failures by all means, but that is also a learning experience. ;)
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Empheba

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