Well, I haven't done one of these for a while, so I thought I'd do up another WIP thread.

This time it's on a fantasy piece I'm working on right now entitled The Sentinel. There is actually a fair amount of meaning in it for me, but nothing I'm gonna go into right now.

Suffice it to say that this all started with playing around with the idea of doing a Son of Satan illustration that got morphed into something else. Sorta.

It's also inspired a lot by how much fun I had working on this Black Magic Iron Man concept piece I did a while ago.

Plus, I needed to do a new fantasy pinup for the 2008 Manitoba Comic Con for the start of October.

Here's the first conceptual sketch I had for this. As I said, I was thinking about the Son of Satan while doodling this one out, about how I really like the whole visual of Mistah Hellstrom and such, and how much fun it would be to draw him surrounded by teh hawt demon chicks.

...somewhere along the way, however, it morphed into something else.

Playing around with it more, I discovered that the women wouldn't actually be looking at him. Their body language became something other than fanboyish hero-worship (not that there's anything wrong with that), and, well, became something else. I also began putting more personal stuff into the central figure, getting away of any pre-existing character.

The more I worked at the idea, the more personal it became. I went with my own hair and beard, co-opted the Black Magic armour (or at least the initial concept for it), and made the women more human.

I went with digital inks on this one. I'm inking and colouring a book for Zeros 2 Heroes right now, and I began experimenting with a more organic style of digital inking on it - the results have been coming out very nicely, and I determined to try using it on some of my own work. This piece is the first such experiment, and I quite like how it worked out.

The first pass at the overall colour scheme, laying down the flat colours.

Overall, this is the idea I'm going with. Warm, desaturated background moving up to cool, saturated foreground. I went with 'regular' flesh tones on the women initially, but the more I look at it, the more I think I'm gonna go with cooler, bluer colours. I'll still make them very distinct from the armour and mecha-trident, but not as California-tanned as they are here.

Here, the first bit of background painting has been done.

I'll probably end up desaturating that background a bit more, depending on how dark I go with the armour and the figures. I'll also be colour-holding the lineart in each background element, pushing the background even further back.

No textures or effects were done here. All the painting was hand-rendered with a variety of brush types, mostly on 'normal' (with some work on 'screen' around the windows and on 'color' to vary the colour of the rendering).

Yeah, seeing it in order like this, I'm definitely gonna be going back to knock back the saturation of that background wall.

Hmm, interesting thread. I've got my own ideas about your inner message with this image, but it's probably not what you really feel.

Cool to see the whole process tho! I'm not sure about desaturating the wall... can't you perhaps do something with the foreground wall then, to compensate? In order to further accentuate the differences brought by the lighting and perspective. Like, some kind of saturated little foreground textures or something?

Wait..I'm thinking wrong here. You want the foreground highly saturated and dark, and the background more similar to white. Yeah, you've been over this lots of times, less saturation and more lightness in the background.

Yeah, I'm gonna be tweaking the backgrounds all the way through. Hopefully not taking them down so much that, when I finally apply glows to the background windows, that the background vanishes entirely.

Here, I've coloured some middle-ground elements and taken the background down further.

So, painting the foreground stonework, I've decided to desaturate the background even further, tweaking the colours and modeling a bit more. Now I'm really getting to where I'm liking the foreground/background separation.

Again, all the painting was done hand-rendered with brushes. The only filter used on any of this was the 'cloud' filter, and that only initially to create a rough pattern of two similar colours before painting. Nothing of that filter can be seen in the final painting, however.

Ian i love these threads,you dont do enough of them

Thanks, Gerry

Yeah, I really love doing them as well. Usually I don't have the time for them, though.

I don't really have the time for this one either, but I thought I really had something to say on it (more about that later, though ).

hey maybe you could do one on that piece i keepo forgetting to send you?

Sure.

Whenever you send it to me to work on, of course

Cool, I dig WIPs.

Vlad

Yeah, it's been a couple of weeks since I last worked on this piece.

Okay, now I've painted the central figure. I've also brought down the cyan on the entire piece...you've really gotta watch how dark cyan can print sometimes.

The rest of the painting.

I'm going to be adding tattoo designs on all the women, so I may end up lightening up one or two of them a little bit.

I'm basing the tattoo on the back of the central woman on a tattoo I drew on a friend of mine back in the very early nineties.

...okay, I'm actually going so far as to copy the tattoo itself from this photograph and drop it onto the back directly.

And, yeah, I do have permission from Wendy (the woman in the photograph) to post this here

Here we have the final piece.

As I went along, I kept lightening and lightening the background. Now I'm quite happy with it.

I also pulled out some of the magenta from the deep background to make the women stand out even more. With plenty of contrast between the women and the central figure, yet keeping each of those elements heavily saturated, there are a few levels of framing going on here.

Turned out great, Ian.

I don't think I would have made the furtherest background quite as pale tho, I would probably have added just a little bit more of a yellow tint, since there's so much purple in the foreground anyway, but I understand the mechanics behind your choice here, and it works.

I like Wendy.

Great look at the inside process. Thanks Ian, great piece!

Vlad