Commission.
Have some rough sketches.
I was lazy when doing my first sketch and forgot that the request involved her playing guitar. Oops.
So I did this second rough instead. Usually my roughs don’t involve shading but I wanted to make sure I was selling the “dramatically backlit” part of this thing.
The guitar was drawn flat on, over a photo of a real guitar; a symbolized copy of it was put into a distortion mesh to get the right twisted cartoon perspective. All the knobs and pickups and strings were drawn on top of that copy because life’s too damn short to try and do a double reverse distortion in my head. The marble’s an image I found on the internet, with its color bashed around via Astute’s Phantasm plugin. Part of me is sad that the head ended up out of frame,;I feel like when you are drawing someone rocking the fuck out on a guitar, it is very important to get details like “yes this is actually a guitar and not a bass, count the tuning pegs” correct, but there’s six strings visible and that’s enough.
Outline view. A little less messy than usual because I’ve been refining some techniques to do a lot of basic lighting automatically. Important stuff gets more lighting added by hand, unimportant stuff stays simple, especially if it’s going to get blurred like the foreground crowd or the cameo of Drumbot in the background.
My inspirational searches for things like “guitarist rocking the fuck out” made it very apparent than when you are rocking the fuck out, electricity tends to appear around your guitar. This happens at live shows, too, right? Maybe I should get out more.