Into the Galaxy progress

Hello my pretties! Above is the finished piece. The time for goofing off and having fun is closed and now it's back to work. Hurrah. Below you can view the steps I took to get to the final piece. Enjoy loves!

Hello again, back to post some in-progress shots to show the steps I take in a piece. The above is still unfinished, waaaay unfinished, it's just what I have so far. The subject? Why, the Doctor of course! I'm always jumping around with methods of stylizing, partly because I don't want to get stuck in one specific style (if I haven't already) and partly because. . . well, I haven't yet found a style that feels right to me. Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting . . . "time".

In the meantime, I had a ton of fun drawing everyone's favourite Scotsman. His lanky frame proved challenging at the very least, considering I'm so used to putting actual meat on bones, thus making my characters fairly healthy if not beefy; and in all the irony I actually dislike the typical steroid muscle man, just doesn't appeal to me as fun to draw or attractive to look at when you've finished. Overly beefy figures like look like a pile of rocks methinks.

Any"Who" I digress. . . (Haha! I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.)

Progress shots of some good old fan art - something I don't make much of these days. I apologize for the small image resolution as these were taken from screencaps rather than saving the image and going back to shrink it down. Besides, all of you will get to see the end result in brilliant resolution once I'm finished.

Thumbnails first to figure out my composition. It's funny, being that art always has a mind of it's own. My original idea is nothing like what I ended up deciding on. Then it's off to roughing out gestures and blocking out the figure.

Again, thin spindly figures are challenging, but rather rewarding. Ah, before I forget I did work out how I could possibly stylize Tennant in the same document as a bit of a warm up so I didn't run into any dead ends.

That was fun, I still need a ton more practice on hands. So as I finish lines for our Doctor, it's time to conceive that pesky, technical, tedious TARDIS. I sketched the first passes by hand, but used Photoshop's help to draw perfectly straight and technical lines.

Aaaand then as I started putting the composition together I started to think. . .

Wait a minute. . . Now Tennant looks like he's really falling. Tragic, and not my intention at all. And what better way to see the picture than to turn it up side down?

There we are, much better. Now he looks like he's having fun listing off into the great depths of the universe rather than falling to his doom into the pit of vacuum blackness. I slapped down some color, constantly testing my palette to make sure the colors looked right against one another. I think I adjusted Tennant's skin color at LEAST seven times to find the right hue against all that spacey purple and blue. Color theory is a beautifully disastrous thing, and I love it.

Anyway, that's what I have for now. I'll probably put it aside to work on other things that need to get done. (And if it's of anyone's curiosity, the stars in the verrrrry top work in progress shot are courtesy of Nasa's snapshot of the gorgeous galaxy, Andromeda, though these are the stars and distant galaxies cut from the surrounding background in the shot.)

Ciao!