Suger Racer process

I've been told I don't show my process enough so I forced myself to keep track of my steps for this piece.

                               

 I started off with a rough sketch. At this point I'm not worrying about the details. First I established the the line of action for the body, which is a nice strong c shape. It may be a still image but it still needs to convey a sense of energy and movement. I roughed out the main shapes of the body around the line of action next. I also made sure to look at some reference images for the Wreck-It Ralph suger rush racers to get the style right.

 I'm not doing a background for this character so I've done a medium gray colour fill to avoid working with a white base. Next I went in with a hard and opaque brush on new layer and filled in the base colours, I'm not doing a black outline for this character so I used  darker skin colour to define the various elements on the character such as the eyes, nose, lips etc. 

Next come the shadows because there can be no light without darkness...Right then, I use complimentary colours for the softer shadows and contrasting purples/blues for the darker ones.

I'm also making sure that I blend the different values on the face as I go along. I find that you can be a bit looser with the blending in other parts of the image but the face needs to be polished as it's the first thing the viewer will be looking at.

I found a fantastic high res wafer texture on the the internet that I skewed to match the perspective of the character. I then painted over it to get the right lighting and matching brush strokes.

I did the same thing for the goggles. I found a photo of a winto-o-green lifesaver, skewed it to get the perspective, then painted over it it fix the lighting and colour.

I added a suger texture to the jacket and cuffs and painted in the chocolate buttons. I've also been refining and adding shadows as I go along. 

Almost done. At this point it's a good idea to get some more feedback on your image. A fresh eye can spot mistakes more quickly. I asked Leisha-Marie Riddel to take a look at my image and she made me some visual notes about pushing the value contrasts even further to really make the image 3D. She also shared her photoshop wizardry skills with me along the way. 

Aaaaand done. At this point I'm happy with how everything looks. I could have worked on it more but it felt like a good place to stop.