My old high-school RPG group has been getting together for a new adventure. We are scattered across the country, but our old game master offered to try his hand at running a game again. He's making a loose system with a setting of early 2000's Las Vegas with some incorporated D&D fantasy elements/tropes turned on their ear.
The game master assigned all of our characters to us pre-made based on some questionnaires we all filled out. Sally is an acrobat for one of the major shows in Las Vegas, and adrenaline junkie who has bad impulse control and a habit of pickpocketing––she's the rogue/thief of the party.
I drew my character: Sally Kim... an art oddity for me—I drew a pleasant looking and thoroughly modern human. Below I'll walk through the process of creating the finished character portrait.
Now, as many of you know, I struggle with drawing attractive humans, and getting me to depict this 27 year old Korean athlete to not end up looking like a deformed goblin meant using lots of reference to draw over top of. Here you can see a collage of photos of a woman on a motorcycle, a woman's face (warped with the liquify tool to adjust her expression) my own arm, and a hand fanning throwing knives.
You'll also see here a mix of my drawings in pencil and digital overtop to get the overall layout and form closer to what I needed. Not seen here, but I redrew her face/head 6 times before just surrendering to using this photo to draw over.
The above digital assemblage was printed out and on my Huion lightpad I was able to re-pencil the composition on a clean sheet of paper. I drew the bike on one sheet of paper, figuring out what details to imply and which ones to try and get accurately. I also wanted to add some stylization with texture on the tires, windscreen, and by adding in all the paint chips and dings.
Sally herself was drawn on a different sheet of paper trying my best to follow the reference while still being truthful to my own sensibilities of line weight and contour decisions.
The two drawings were scanned and assembled in photoshop where I could make minor adjustments for alignment and cohesion.
Those pencils were then printed onto copy paper and taped to the back of a sheet of Strthmore 300 series bristol where I could ink the piece on my trusty Huion lightpad. I used Copic Multiliner SP pens––mostly the 0.7 nib, but I used a 0.3 for her eyes and the tattoos.
Before I started inking I'd seriously considered just coloring the tight pencils...but opted to just trust in my normal process and that I could add something in the inks.
As usual I think I both added some qualities while also losing a little bit of the purity and lightness of the pencils.
With the inks scanned I started the color flatting process. This is where flat colors are painted in to block in what areas are what colors...like a professional version of coloring-in-the-lines. The main color choice decision here was here bike and clothes. The cuttoff shirt is based on a real Nirvana tee, so I used those colors, but her leggings became rust to be a compliment of the dark blue bike (so her motorcycle is a bit more stealthy for a thief).
At this stage I also established color holds (areas where I want the linework to be a color other than black) for the circle/moon, the windshield lines, the headlight, tee printing, bike dings and dents, tattoos, the ground texture, and Sally's lips and eyes.
The last step was to render the colors using highlights, shadows, and texture to make the forms feel more dimensional. While I did use the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop for some of this, for the majority of the rendering I took a different approach and used a few textured brushes and the paintbrush tool.
For this being out of my comfort zone and despite my early struggles with getting this piece started, I'm pretty happy with the final results.
