ANATOMY OF A COMMISSION PT3

So, here is the last of my trilogy, not an epic Star Wars trilogy but I will save that for a later date. We started coloring last week by defining our focal area in the illustration (the girl and the bear). Now I move into the BG characters, I start with Mr Freeze (the Blue guy on the left) and work my way around to the right. I am trying to keep things simple and describe the planes facing the light and those not facing the light. While I do this I have reference open of a space suit to see how the folds and highlights occur on an actual space suit type material.

Here I wrapped up on Mr Freeze, I added a little red glow from the instrument panel on his belt and cleaned up his freeze gun. For Joker, I reduced the size of his head just a tiny bit to fix the perspective and make him feel like he is farther back, behind Mr. Freeze instead of on the same ground plane. Now on to the Penguin, he is wearing a black suit but remember, light is influencing his suit and since black is a very absorbent color I push it a tiny bit warmer describing how the light is affecting his suit. However, I was conscious about maintaining the BG value system so that it doesn't break the picture and take away focus from the girl...PHEW! You guys get all that?


Next, is very subtle change but it helps push the BG characters back into space a bit more. If you notice, the spaces in between Joker, Mr Freeze and Penguin are all very warm, I decided to inject some cooler colors (blues) in those areas to add another layer of depth and push it back in space yet again.

We are almost there, I finished off the cast of characters in the background and added the question marks to the Riddler's suit. I had to make sure I was rendering the question marks with the form and perspective of his body or else it would just look like a really bad cut and paste job. Additionally, the top of my illustration I added cooler tones to it to really make the focal area the brightest/warmest area. Wrapping up I then brought Catwoman to a finish and finally added a little more light to the ceiling lamp for dramatic affect. VIOLA!

OK here is the real VIOLA! Before I got to the finish I showed the piece to a few buddies asking their opinion on it. This is really important because you need those fresh eyes to give you an honest assessment of things, that is the only way you will get better. After talking with my friends I increased the contrast of the little girl again and painted back in some definitive light on the upward facing planes of her and the box she is standing on. By increasing the contrast in that area it helped to create a cleaner read. Last but not least, I readjusted Catwoman's hand and hair so there wouldn't be an awkward tangent anymore.

That's basically it, thanks for hanging in there on this journey with me. I hope this was of some help to anyone who looks at this darn blog. As always, I will be back with more art and some sketchbook pages. See you all soon!