Rise of the Empire - WIP

I don't make a habit of uploading scraps, or work in progress - but I thought that some of you might find it interesting or maybe even useful to see how I work through a piece.

This shows you some of the key steps of how I worked on my 'Rise of the Empire' piece:


First of all, I start by roughing out some 'thumbnail' sketches to get an idea of which characters I'll use and how they'll fit in to the composition. At this stage there's no detail - just rough shapes - and it's usually helpful to draw these sketches in a small scale (hence the name "thumbnail") as you're just exploring how the image will fill the page/screen.

Then, when I have a composition I like, I refine the sketch into a finished pencil drawing (the top left image). I keep the pencils fairly 'loose' - as I know I can work on the detail later in the colouring stage.

To help me pick out my finished line work I sometimes go over my pencil work in ink (the top right image) - although this isn't necessary if you have nice, clear pencil lines.

Then I scan the picture in and start to work out what colour-scheme I want to use (the bottom left image). Here I've used 'layers' so that I can roughly paint in a background colour to see how it will contrast with the colours I'll use for the characters. I can also start to lay down the base colours for the characters in the picture (I'll usually draw each character on a seperate layer). As I work on the picture I might also make changes to the composition - and you'll see here that the main thing I changed was to increase the size of the two (blue) guards which I'd initially drawn as characters in the background.

When the picture is almost complete (the bottom right image) - there's still time for some final tweaks. Here, most notably, I made the Sith characters more transparent and added colour accents to the Clone Troopers so that they tied in with the overall colour-scheme.

Hope that gives you some ideas or tips for your own pictures!