I forgot to mention in the previous post that the design for his staff-head was influenced by a decorative design I saw on a gate while taking a break from this piece; it caught my eye as I was out wandering with my dog, thinking about how I could use the sunlight to my advantage in the composition - the design has sunrise written all over it, so I thought it might add a nice extra element to the character design, maybe providing some sort of backstory.
Also on my wanderings, I'd decided upon the colour palette for the character: having been looking at some images of Playstation Home's Mos Eisley Cantina location, I'd been attracted to the brown/blue colour combo. I've used it before in other projects and it's definitely a favourite of mine. I think it fits the character well, as the different shades of brown robes scream hobo. Or jakey.
The blue was destined to be applied to the spell he's in the midst of casting - the two colours together add to the strange scene I'm trying to portray: an evil character in an unusually bright setting.
One of my predetermined goals for this project was that I would try out a few different art-styles throughout my work. I'd already tried out several different sketching styles along the way, and now I was ready to try my hand at a finished piece using cel-shading - a style I haven't really touched for a couple of years.
I did a fair bit of research into how cel-shading can benefit an illustration; most notably is in cases where the lighting is quite extreme, and high-contrast is likely to occur. I figured that this piece fit the bill fairly well. Also, the jaggy shadows and edges that would be produced by the torn robes would definitely benefit from the hard edged shading, hopefully reiterating the point that this is a dangerous character (Kekai Kotaki's Evil Character Design 101: spikes, spikes and more spikes)
So I gave myself a crash-course in the basics of the technique and set to work. I discovered that careful planning and organisation will assist the entire process immeasurably, from start to finish. Layer and mask management will also allow for swift modifications to be made wherever necessary during the process. This is good to know, as you can get some very nice colour blends from the technique if you're careful and use non-destructive editing throughout the colouring stages. Having access to quick and easy colour shifts at the end of a project is always a bonus that can lead to real happy endings.
I'd been following a couple of different tutorials regarding cel-shading to begin with, just to get a feel for it, but soon found myself integrating some of my own techniques into the workflow to try and mix it up a bit. It took quite a few hours to get the entire shadow mask drawn out, but by the time it came to the end stages of colour editing, it was all worth it. The example below shows my final result on the character, which I'm pretty chuffed with.
I also decided upon the BG being based around a very desaturated light brown, to assist in the blue spell popping out from the page.
In accordance with the change in perspective from my original planning sketches, I sketched out the new BG, using a desert-type landscape with some jutting rocks for visual interest. I kept to my original plan of letting the flowing robes and clouds steer the viewer's eye around. At this point I had the idea of his power generating the wind around him, thus causing the flow. I used the clouds to create a kind of vortex around him and implemented a sort of fish-eye perspective on the vertical axis to make the composition more interesting.
I'm not entirely convinced that this worked out terribly well - the whole process altered the composition quite drastically and may have resulted in me taking it in the wrong direction, but what's done is done.
The last adjustment I made was to add a desaturated blue gradient across the sky (originally it was a lighter brown, as if within a sandstorm). The blue worked tons better for the image, unifying the palette and providing a backdrop from which the character could really pop.
So here's the final illustration...
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