The last guide I did was on painting a landscape stage for my cartoon series, and this one will be on how I create one of my more highly detailed in-game characters.
Again, I am using Procreate on an iPad, a layer-based versatile painting app, similar to a lightweight photoshop. Once I have a character finished, I flatten the layers so that I can move it around and scale it within my final editing layout.
To begin with, we pick the biggest compositional elements, the hair, boots and tabard.
The next step is to place a layer behind the current layer and start blocking in the protruding bones and under layers of armor.
Now we paint in the flesh which for once will be behind the bones ;p in another back layer. Then we start a layer between the bones and the tabard where we can start adding shadow values to the bones and block in our face.
Now we can add "larger detail" layers, where we can start inserting fibers patterns and insignia to the tabard, as well as inking in some strands on the hair and adding face details.
You've probably noticed that I have avoided the arms, and there is a reason for that aside from our character being undead and naturally in rather poor condition. This is so that we can mirror the arms and avoid having to paint two of them.
This isn't just laziness: it allows us to position the arms as we need later on.
We paint one arm, using three different layers, also painting in our shoulder armor, then flatten the layers and duplicate the finished result. Once it is duplicated, we can do a mirror flip and drag it to the other shoulder.
You can see, with the background color changed, that using brushes that have strand and translucency effects add to the realism of the final effect by making it look less like a photoshop cut and paste.
We add detail to the tabard design, and also to the boots.
We can replace our background with the full painted environment, but our work isn't done. With our character fully flattened, now is when we step back and assess our results.
We clean up a few edges, heighten some details that looked too sloppy, and also notice that we forgot to paint the belt! Oops!
Lastly, we select a color from the environment, lighten it, and use it to add highlights to our character, then some ground shadows. This adds further realism and keeps the character from looking too "drag and drop."
Of course for my intents, I don't want the character to blend in too much, because for ease of viewing the cartoon and following character dynamics it is better to have the characters stand out. This was hard with the rogue character from previous frames since they become translucent when stealthed.
If I wanted this character to blend seamlessly, I would remove the sharp inking highlights and instead use a soft low value brush to add environmental highlights and shadowing, and then slightly reduce the opacity of the character, so that the ambient light infused it better.
I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial: if you did, follow for more content, vote and resteem! There will be more guides in the future as well as regular new content for the N00b Squad cartoon strip.
Thank you for reading and Steem on!