Rye vs Monster Splash Painting

This illustration is the end result of my Splash Painting Module. This was the first time I had ever painted something like this; my natural art style is much more like Anime and Manga. This painting was a challenge but a rather enjoyable challenge. I will showcase all my progress below. 

Firstly, since the brief for this project was incredibly broad and gave me a lot of creative freedom, I needed to select a character to use. My choice was my Original Character Rye as shown above. These two drawings were made purely as a design reference and so that I had an up-to-date version of his designs available digitally. Then I needed inspiration on what to possibly draw. My main inspirations were the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Hyrule warriors: Age of Calamity and the Riot Games style pieces of Artwork found on Artstations front page.

Next, I researched poses. Most of them are action type poses since Rye is a Knight, they were the most appropriate. The poses in the image on the left are the ones I took from the first round of research and refined with the inclusion of some taken from life drawings and a pose myself and a fellow member of my life drawing group acted out in the studio. Then I took four poses forward to create black and white thumbnails. 

To help aid myself in creating good compositions I used a combination of the rule of thirds and a couple of good composition grids, making sure I placed points of interest on the thirds and/or where the grid lines intersected. Another thing I made sure to keep in mind is good read and contrast. I made sure that the contrast between the characters in the foreground and the background was high enough so they could read easily at a first glance and to create a sense of depth in the image. 

Now I could start on the actual painting. The slider above shows the progress from half of the characters line art to a value study to the flat colours including the tweaks done to the characters pose to make it feel more logical and my own personal notes about two of the lights in the three point setup I was using. 

This final process slider shows the progress from adding some light shading and Fresnel to the stage where I had the fill light partially added. Then from that stage to adding the key light, some rim light and reflectivity, including more of my personal notes to aid colour picking, to the final stage. There were multiple tweaks during the final stages where I put the wings on Rye into better perspective and changed the anatomy on the monsters hand.  I added some textured lighting, multiply layers, highlights, Ambient Occulsion and gradient layers to create atmosphere and complete the illustration.