My workflow

Hello all,
I've had a few people ask me to give a rundown on how I work. So I thought i'd give a sort of blow by blow from concept to finish.

First off, I work on a Cintiq21UX, this thing is a wonder. (I've had it since January and feel ashamed to have not touched a pencil to paper since...)

Software i'm using is Photoshop.

STEP 1: ROUGH/THUMBNAIL

Normally I will either rough the scene out in thumbnail form or since I'm not mostly working straight digitally I just do a rough directly to stage out the scene in the actual format, which in this case is 853x480. Here is the first rough.

So here is just the general staging and an idea where to word bubble should or will go, the important thing here is mostly getting a good silhouette and negative spacing so that things will read correctly.




STEP 2: FLESHING THINGS OUT A BIT

So now I start working in a bit of construction.





But I soon realize it's not what I had in mind. I had envisioned more of a downward angle on the scene. So I'm forced to scrap that and try again.

So I start over, now this is a bit closer to what I intended. woohoo! Though it's not visible here I had enlarged the canvas in photoshop to sketch out the scene down to the floor so that the character placement would be correct and to avoid either one of them floating or having their legs going through the floor.




So again I start to work out the construction and work in the background.




So now that i've got the characters constructed enough for my particular needs here, I start to tighten things up a bit, aidding detail and refining things as I go.






So now this is what we've got so far all together...
now it's time to clean it up!




STEP 3: THE CLEAN-UP
So now the scene is cleaned up. Each character and the BG on separate layers. (BG opacity has been lowered here to make things a bit clearer.



Before colouring I select the negative space around the characters with the magic wand tool.
I then go Select>modify>expand by 1 pcx.
then go Select>inverse



Afterwards I create a mask, i'll duplicate it for the shadow layer further on. So now my colours will stay within the character.




STEP 4: COLOUR
So the base colour is applied to the characters.





STEP 5: SHADOWS

So next is the shadow layer, I make a copy of the colour layer and erase the colour keeping the mask. The shadows are drawn using pure black and I adjust the opacity to the level that I need. This scene called for darker shadows it's at around 75% opacity.



I make a mask for the background and apply the base colour.



Now the shadows are applied to the background, they are in two layers.





I then added a shadow effect near the bottom to darken the scene a bit more.



Now i've added the highlights to the scene, there is a reflection on Jan, it was done with the paint brush and gaussian blur on a seperate layer.

There is also a second layer of light just between Jan and Armand's layer coming from the ceiling.

STEP 6: HIGHLIGHTS





STEP 7: FINISHING TOUCHES

So now it's just the finishing touches, added a bit more highlights on the metal surfaces, Armand's cast shadow on the wall, a slight blur effect on the Armand and the BG to give a bit more depth. some glow on their pupils. And also fixed Jan's thumb which was a bit too big before.



And there we go! It's done hope that was interesting or maybe informative to someone. This whole scene took me about 4 hours from start to finish.

Bye for now.