Grendel and Rivers Steps

Here are the steps for my drawing Grendel and Rivers.

1: This is the initial draft.  It's a quick sketch of how I wanted the drawing to look.  I try to keep things really "doodly" since they will get erased and re-done dozens of times.  If I invest too much time into drawing out the characters I might resist changing them and ultimately stub my composition trying to work it around the what I've already accomplished.  I have the perspective grid on in the background to help me develop a more convincing composition.

2:  I clean up the draft and mature the lineart.  Since my style lacks lines in the final painting, I don't do a lot of work to make my lines very clean.  They only need to guide me when I paint and will eventually be folded into the colors.  Between this step and the third step, I took some time to "de-square" a lot of background elements by adding bends and curves into objects like the hay bale and canopies.

3:  Initial color blocking.  I do this step zoomed way out so I get the global grand view of what's happening in the entire composition rather than trapping myself into the way the light looks in one particular area.  I try to worry more about color temperature at this stage vs how accurate the lighting on the figures are since I'll correct that later.  I avoid using true black and white in my paintings since an abundance of these values can make the palette appear cold or dead.  I spend a lot of time here since the color draft provides the palette I'll use for rendering the figures.

4:  I'm halfway through rendering the background.  I'm using a chalk brush which adds a lot of texture to the colors and helps add a bit of depth.

5:  The background is complete.  The hay bale was a lot of fun to render out.  I decided to add little birds in the background to make the tent seem bigger.

6:  Grendel and Rivers are rendered out and in doing so I accidentally made Rivers head super bulbous ><

7:  Fixed up the head on Rivers and added some lighting on the edges of his and Grendel's body to help them pop on the background a bit more.  Painted the candy and popcorn (which of course made me hungry) and finished up a few details in the background.

The last panel is the chalk brush I used for most of the drawing.  The first dark swatch on the right shows how the pen pressure linked to opacity affects the stroke.  The bottom lighter stroke is how the brush stacks with various pressure.


Here is the completed drawing:

Here are the ref sheets for Grendel and Rivers:

Created with Adobe Photoshop.