MtG: Tomik, Distinguished Advokist - with process

Ok so this is a very straightforward commission, no need for lots of different exploration sketches or anything, there's just one way to do this thing so I go straight to the drawing! The composition is clear in my head so I just scribble it out

Now it gets tricky because sometimes when you think you have a clear vision, you actually just THINK you do, and when it comes to the actual details, your brain has in fact not magically imagined all the little design things and so on.

Time for the colors! Since the mood was crucial here, this is the most important step of the entire process for me. So what I do is put in the key colors in broad strokes, still under the lines, until I'm sure that it reads from afar.

With the colors decided on, I hid the line layer and started fleshing out our man Tomik, starting with the face and then working outward from there all the way to the feet. I try to keep most of the detail in the focal area, which is his face.

Everything else gets less detail and broader strokes and softer edges so it doesn't compete with where we want our viewer to look!

Now it was time to battle with Gargoyle Pupper again and AGAIN he gave me trouble. You can't polish a turd though so I started over twice on him until I felt his surface read stone-ish enough. There's like moss and lichen on him as well.

With the key parts of the image finished, I take a deep breath. This is the stage where your heartrate returrns to a normal level, you take a break and then sit your ass down to finish the rest before you run out of steam.

So I just do one element after the other, occasionally browsing through pictures of buildings or even eyeballing and at some points eyeballing references to get the feel right. I try to avoid working directly FROM ref because it always feels out of place.

Now we're almost done! Just need to finish the stuff in the distance now. I try to think about how buildings would cast shadows on each other and try to keep it painterly. I keep the sky soft so the eye has some place to rest.

Dawn approves and tells me to push the early morning light on the sky a bit to visually unify the piece with the rest of Act 1! So Step 10 is the final after adjustments.