I recently got commissioned to draw and paint a "cute" Orc Barbarian, something that doesn't usually go together too well, but I gave it my best shot.
The first thing I did was to do a rough sketch, to get an idea of what sort of pose/weapons/body style I wanted to give him, I settled with just a very basic frontal view, and as with almost all of my drawings I wanted everything to be asymmetrical, once I had sketched out a couple of examples, I settled on the best parts of both, and inked the outlines with a 0.5mm liner, and then scanned it into my computer (In case I wanted to do a digital version later) which looked like this ...
It's pretty rough, but I like keeping a digital record of most stuff I do.
Once I did that I was ready to start painting, I cracked out the watercolours and set up my station ready to paint, I wanted to use a limited palette this time cause recently I have felt like some of my work has been a bit too busy, and I wanted to tone everything down and get back to basics - I mixed up both the green and the brown, and all other browns were just a slight variation of the pants colour
Once I had all of the base colours down I focused on some details and light shadowing (I call it shadowing even though it's not really, because tend not to pick a light source and stick to it, I just darken areas that I feel need more depth)
Once that was done I went over my lines again, this time with a 0.8mm liner to try and add some line variation and to make the piece pop out a little, and this is what I ended up with.
I kept it pretty simple, but I am very happy with the texture I managed to get from the paper and paint, and of course I didn't forget the bees :)