extremely NSFW art ahead
It’s okay, he’s perfectly fine, this is fantasy, if he needs internal organs or other body parts they are safely folded away in the same kind of dimensional pockets that cartoon characters pull giant hammers out of.
When I did the sketch, I realized pretty quickly that a character this simple really doesn’t need a ton of work put into them. There’s a certain minimum amount of work I really don’t want to fall below on a drawing, so I sketched out a lot of background, and proposed putting this expensive-looking pot full of fucktoy dog into an equally expensive-looking setting. The client liked this idea, so I went looking for some inspiration…
After a moment’s thought I decided that my inspiration would mostly be “Maxfield Parrish”, so I did an image search for his stuff and put a bunch of it on the side of the canvas. My color palettes would be largely eyedroppered off of these things.
Since I was looking at Parrish’s work I also thought about his technique: lots of painstakingly thin glazes of oil paint. I started playing with adding a gradient fill to entire layers of the drawing, which reproduced this sort of thing a lot faster than Parrish was able to do it in oils. There’s lots of other stuff going on with a few different ways of making Illustrator do rim lighting for me that I’ve been doing lately; the extra gradients tied it together nicely. I’m really pleased with how much of the lighting here isn’t in the form of highlights and shadows I drew by hand; I can draw those pretty quickly but it’s really nice to have most of it happen automatically.
And here’s the outline view with the outside layer turned on. All those rectangles are transparent gradients with a wavy effect, in layers between chunks of the background; they ended up a little too subtle for the waviness to be noticeable. This happens. Maybe I’ll do something else with that effect more visible later on.
This is a technique I use a lot for creating a sense of depth; split the background into a few loosely-drawn layers, alternating with layers of translucent sky color. Usually I’ll give the background layers increasing levels of blur as well but Parrish’s stuff is characterized by a lot of really crisp backgrounds with sky color glazed over it, so I left them unblurred here.
Looks pretty cheesy without the air layers, huh? This is a great way to quickly add a lot of depth to your art without fussing around with vanishing points and perspective grids. Just draw some loose shapes that frame your subject, intersperse some air, and you’re good.