This was my third commissioned piece of art--and continued the trend of pushing new challenges, techniques and learning along the way. For this piece, it was time to tackle a macro-scale character for the first time with the intention of a perspective shot; the character in question is a 100' tall African painted dog mercenary (good gracious) code-named 'China White'--who was to be seated on her makeshift throne by way of a mostly crushed building.
Lots and lots of new challenges this time around, which is good--though it did mean that the piece ended up taking a good bit longer than I initially anticipated. China's attire was makeshift camouflage, so I thought it would be visually and thematically interesting if she'd essentially had to make her (rather sizable) clothing needs via a patchwork of camouflage tarps and the like, using ropes and cables and so forth for 'thread'.
As a result, I wanted to push to make the camouflage intentionally a bit disjointed, since the patchwork has to make due--and to have the pieces varied in their shape, size and attachment (with a few even starting to tear away / missing, too.) On top of this, being a painted dog, China herself has a pretty wild fur pattern--so long story short, it took a pretty decent chunk of time to color and shade this piece.
All that said, I'm pretty thrilled with the results and feeling ever more confident in my progress with each completed piece. China was a fun character to work on and an interesting foray into a number of new territories for me, such as macro characters. I appreciate the opportunity to work on this one!
As often as I can try, I like to create an animated time-lapse gif of the production process--and managed to do so for this piece as well for anyone interested: http://i.imgur.com/L7koccB.gifv
