I was looking for something fun and brainless to work on during my lunches at work, and dug up some old thumbnails as a starting point.
After choosing one which I felt would allow me to play around with some bold color/contrast choices, I moved on to a grayscale sketch, checking my image flow and composition now and then to be sure I wouldn't have to rework something crucial.
From here there was a whole lot of fiddling with the pose in various sketches and getting feedback from friends and colleagues. If there is something I wish I would have spent more time on here, it would have been getting better references for the pose. A lesson to be applied on another day!
Color comp was easily the most fun part. I opted for orange/purple with high contrast.
After that it was just hacking away at the actual painting of the image. All the hard thinking was pretty much done (except for some outfit explorations).
There's nothing too magical about the rendering phase. I work in layers, back-to-front, trying to get the 'boring' stuff out of the way early. Halfway through this part is where the doubts come in. Since the fun part, the figuring out, is already done, this is where I tend to drop an image and start another. Since I'd been doing some thinking on that lately, though, I was able to catch myself in the act and force myself to see it through (huzzah for introspection!).
Lately my main exercise is to force myself to stay loose, to keep some painterliness in the final. I failed that on the hair, where everything is rendered a bit tighter than I'd like (Poor choice of a rough brush at the midpoint required too much cleanup work), however the elbow and forearm came out, I think, quite well. Small victories :)
Much of the fantasy art that attracted me back in the day was simple, bold and almost graphic. I'm still playing around with how to integrate that into my own work, but I'm quite satisfied with the punchy-ness here. It's about as subtle as a shovel to the face, and that feels right.
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