What started as a mere doodle…

The other day I was sitting in one of my classes, absentmindedly doodling in my notebook. I like to take notes in color, so it was only natural for me to color my small doodle. I have been doodling quite a lot lately actually, but I think that this particular doodle caught my attention because of the colors I chose. The weren’t particularly a great combination, but it actually inspired me to create a new illustration. Sadly, I don’t know where the doodle is anymore, but here is the final result:

I did the initial sketch in mypaint, a fantastic free program for sketching and exploring ideas:

After some editing, I came up with a clean sketch:
I then did the lineart in paint tool Sai since it has an awesome smoothing feature Photoshop lacks:

I then proceeded to fill the sketch with values in Photoshop, a very important step I know realize. I read about it in Character Mentor: Learn by Example to use Expressions, Poses, and Staging to Bring Your Characters to Life by Tom Bancroft. In the book he writes that characters need to stand out from their environment through some sort of contrast. After that, I did an initial fill of color:

This step was probably the most difficult for me, I did so many different color combinations until I found one that I was more or less satisfied with. And from then it was a simple matter of shading, and highlighting. I deviated from the darker colored hair, but I don’t think this was too much of a problem:

I then created the background and did a second “coat of paint” on the character:

I have never drawn grass before so it was a bit of a challenge, it actually took me two tries to get to this but overall I am happy with the result. It was definitely easier creating this illustration then the last one, mainly because I was more certain of how to go about an illustration. Hopefully I can keep improving, and creating more illustrations as days go on.