Following up on this entry, I’m adding a proper walk-through on the different stages of the making of this year’s Lori.
This year, the only guideline I received was: “We discussed it at a meeting at the start of the year, the idea of her in a shonen pose, looking pretty menacing and angry. But it’s always really up to you“.
So after trying out a few design sketches, this is what I thought had the best mix of action, pose and bad-assery. Lori is getting ready for another swing while maintaining a defensive stance. Calm, focused and not too aggressive.
This is the chosen design sketch:
She’s changed from here on out. The proper pencil sketch became the base of the different stages that followed: ink, streamlining and colouring.
I noticed that in the pencil sketch, the eyes aren’t lined up and looking in the desired direction properly. Modified in the inked stage.
The inking has been done by hand, scanned, cleaned up and then traced to vector.
This makes the picture to be very clean and it also gets rid of impurities that may still be hanging around the scan.
I started the colouring by adding shadows as a base to define the light source.
I followed up by filling in the base colours – Orange, white, green.
The highlights came last.
This gif gives you an idea of the progression of the applied shadows, then the applied highlights, how they work on a black background and how they applied on the final composition.
Click to zoom on the final revision.
Floor shadow and after effects added in at the end.
