Madcat painting WIP

To start off this section, let's get a look at this new Madcat painting I'm doing from the Battletech universe. I like to start with an initial line drawing. This one didnt take very long, but I sometimes I might need to go through a few before I'm good with the layout. The next phase is to start breaking out some values and colors. This part can take a couple hours sometimes. Below is the current progress. The original for this one is 1800x2200

Update on Sunday, September 25, 2011 at 07:05PM by Rick Knox

Today I did some lighting work to show the moon light on the top of the mech.

Update on Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 09:57PM by Rick Knox

Couple more hours of detailing breaks out alot of the madcats hull plating, vents, and so on.

Update on Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 06:11PM by Rick Knox

The final image in the series, I did some background detailing, actually did a couple of iterations, then did a good color pass to get the final details. The color pass is probably the most important part. As seen from the progress I can pretty quickly get an idea of what I want just from the line drawing. By doing some simple coloring I can break out detail areas, color direction and so on. However it isnt until I do the lighting, coloring, overlays, adjustment layers, etc that the scene suddeling comes to life.