After having flown through the Warlock illustration with relative ease, I set about finishing off the Spellsword girl's design.
My first task was to decide on the colours throughout her design. Working straight into the linework for her illustration, I laid down flats in an experimental manner, trying to stumble upon the winning combo. Just about every colour combination I could think of was used in this stage (in hindsight, I should really have saved all of the variations, but I was so exhausted at the time that the thought didn't even cross my mind... having a 6-month old kid means working through the night and being absolutely shattered all day becomes commonplace, as does a semi-functional mind!).
It was actually her demonic hand that gave me the idea for her final colours; the hand kept reminding me of a gargoyle, which in turn made me think of grey demons, which led to desaturated blue and greys throughout her outfit and sword, and grey-blue hair. It took a while to get there, but it was definitely the best of a bad bunch.
With the flats worked out, I had a think about what style I would use for this illustration.
Having used cel-shading for the Warlock - and loved the process - I thought it would be a good opportunity to use a slightly altered technique for this girl. I thought of ways in which I could combine the techniques I had learnt from cels with my own personal illustration style. I applied the overall technique here and fairly enjoyed it - both the process and result.
Unlike the Warlock illustration, I hadn't planned this one very well at all, and boy was it a struggle at times!! All I knew about her was what I had in front of me... that she was sitting somewhere with a severed head in her hand. Just having this to go on kind of limited my options!
I sketched out several possible environments and moods as quickly as possible, hoping that some plausible idea would leap out at me. It took a while for me to get anything. I stretched the canvas in all directions, playing around with flow lines, focal points etc without really getting anywhere. Taking a break from it, I eventually started to try and make sense of the messy scribbles.
Shapes have a funny habit of popping out when you least expect them, and soon I was seeing cliffs and spires. I had nothing else to go on. With deadlines getting closer I figured I had to bite the bullet and just go with gut instinct. I defined the shapes I had seen, and stuck a rock under her ass, because it made a little bit of sense.
The rest of the process is a bit of a blur; by this point I was having to work all through the night while the kid slept (as she requires so much attention during the daytime that it's near-impossible to get this kind of work done) then score a couple of hours sleep on the couch in the morning, wake up and get through the day before doing the same thing again. However, sleep deprivation has it's benefits; you can sometimes get nice ideas from out of nowhere. On the other hand, your brain is more likely to refuse to function when you really need it to... which happened quite frequently here.
Anyhoos, I played with a ton of ideas during the time it took me to figure out that she was sitting next to a small bay. I didn't have too many guidelines to help me create flow around the image, so I tried to give the illustration an underlying narrative that would both enforce her evil, ruthless nature and also guide the viewer around the illustration.
I was making stuff up on the spot, throwing ideas all over the place before I finally resigned to the fact that most of them were a bit crap, so I just kept the ones that weren't completely ridiculous. I have no idea if the narrative aspect works for this piece or not... I spent so much time working on it that it no longer makes much sense when I look at it! That and I've never really tried narrative-driven-compositions before, so it's all a bit new to me. But fun, nonetheless.
When it came to colouring the BG, I knew from when I coloured the girl that I wanted the light source to be top-right. I'd been working through quite a few sunrises during this time, so that's where the idea for that came from; a nice, mellow morning setting. It sets quite an interesting atmosphere, as if the battle took place during the night and now as the sun has risen, there's calm across the bay. Similar to the Warlock illustration, it's unusual to see an evil character in a bright-ish scene.
So that's about it the gist of it for this illustration. There was a lot of juggling around towards the end of it, and there are still a lot of things I'm not happy with or would change, but time was running out for me and I had to move on.
This is the final illustration...
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