Look at Tim's doodles

Well, it's Thursday, and here on the ole' rustbelt blog we have decided to allocate the Thursday posts to me. So, for my first "Thursday Post" I have some process shots of some old work to show you.

This illustration was part of a larger project designing characters for a possible videogame and comic book. It was intended to be a finished final illustration of this character; and for various reasons, it never got there. It is however at a point that I feel that I can show it without hiding my face in shame, and I have a few process shots that somebody might find interesting.

The idea was to illustrate this character looking sexy/tough/badass leaning against a brick wall in an alley, surrounded by all sorts of graffiti, neon lights, and basically kinda riff on a "Blade Runner" aesthetic. Yeah it's defiantly not an original idea, but... it's fun none the less.

Figuring out the pose took a bunch of tries, a lot of thumbnails and reference (you can see the hand ref' placed on the image), also knowing that I wanted a brick wall, I created a grid in photoshop to get the perspective believable.

 

Next major step was to render the image in a greyscale, at this point I was only planing to use the one direct light source from the upper right, so that's all that I rendered. This proved to be a huge mistake later as I wanted to add light sources further in the illustration, and I wished that I had drawn them in this phase, because the more I work on an image, the more I get tired with it, and major changes become a headache later on.

At this point the rendering is "finished" monochromatically, and from here I started to add color on separate layers using photoshop's color modes (multiply, color, overlay). By the time I got to this point in the image, I had worn myself out, and just begun to realize how boring the overal image was, and how much more thought I should have but into designing the background/environment in the original composition.

So basically, what I ended up with at this point was a half finished illustration, and a pretty solid lesson in the importance of having well thought out sketches (a lesson I still am learning the hard way). Other outside factors contributed to this drawing going nowhere (the rest of the project kind of fell through at right about this spot in this drawing), but the poor compositional planning is on me.

I do like this image, and where it was going, and maybe someday i'll finish it on my own, but in all likelihood, I'm so far away from this drawing and project, that i'd probably be better of just starting over with a similar idea. 

-Tim