secret garden party here I come!

Here's an update on three pigs picture.
It's pretty much just straight rendering from here on out, so no more explanatory text I'm afraid! By this stage I'm doing things intuitively (but not always correctly!) so it's quite hard for me to break it down into useful info... sorry!
anyway, here's the art so far, still got a hell of a long way to go...

Just had some work featured in the superb online magazine Carne.
It's a free downloadable image heavy mag with loads of cool work from artists and photographers.
Go and have a look!
carnemag.com

and another speedie:

and another one....

Lunchtime quickie from a screengrab. Just under an hour.

Hello again

STAGE 4 continued:
When I got to the stage where I was happy with the sketch of the four central characters I created a document with the dimensions I wanted (I normally paint on a canvas roughly 5000 x 3000 pixels in size) and pasted them in. Then I spent about an hour just moving and scaling them around the page until they were sat in a space I liked, which ended up being fairly central.

STAGE 5
I hate doing backgrounds, I find them really dull to paint compared to characters, but in some cases you just can't do without them. In this painting quite a lot of the "story" is going to be told by the background (house blown down, bath broken etc.) so I've got to put a bit of thought into it. Firstly I drew a load of rough and quick directional lines and circles over the image marking wear the viewers eye flows around the page, and some other lines where I WANT it to flow.
The picture below is a little bit misleading because it looks like I drew the outline of the buildings/furniture etc then shaded it in, when actually it was the other way around. I slapped in some very quick tone using just the direction lines as a guide, the aim being to define and emphasize the characters. Once that was done I went back in and scribbled some rough outlines of a broken house over the blocks of tone. The main thing to point out I suppose is light pigs = dark background dark wolf = light background; this was so neither faction was more prominent than the other but both stood out against their respective backgrounds.

Having got that out of the way (and because I find backgrounds so tedious!) I went back and started working up the outfit of the wolf. I wanted her to have a sort of military/ringmastery vibe. I internally debated for ages on wheter or not to go fully nude; I normally try and avoid it if possible for a number of different reasons which I can't be bothered going into right now. In this case however the wolf just didn't look right with pants on; I like the brazen-ness it gives her character to be (nearly!) fully dressed but still essentially naked.

Then I started throwing some quick and dirty colour in. At this point I nearly threw my wacom pen done in digust and washed my hands of the whole horrible mess. Sometimes things just don't go the way you want them to! I gave myself a bit of a break from the pic and worked on some other stuff for a couple of days.

A few days away gave me a better perspective of where I was going wrong, and I went back in and started tweaking colours. This is a bit too brown/purpley at the minute, but compared to the monstrosity above it's a masterpiece!

Most of the tweaks from now on will be fairly self-explanatory so that's pretty much the end of the written portion of this run through I think. So now when I say "I did a quick sketch and then started colouring it" this is an approximation of the process that goes on. Hope it was interesting!

This is the second pic I did for Bizarre magazines editors page of one of their staff members.