And it's done, a simple CG done entirely for color and rendering practice. Was originally going to be more stylized with a less detailed texturing but ended up doing so anyway. I also changed the way I render hair. It's not much but I'm no longer doing it strand by strand but instead using basic painting techniques. I'm more more towards just doing with others do rather then experiment as much a I use to. I can't keep failing critiques and all of my practice and studying so far shows it's for the best to just go with the trends or pre-established techniques for better or worse until you actually have something that is truly stylized the right way or just well done to great realism. For those curious, Stylizing is the art of exaggerating or excluding certain detail and bending certain rules to express an emotion or theme without resorting to realism. It can also be done to create a simplified image/animation.
Back to this image, Al of the coloring and rendering as well as texturing was all done by hand using my wacom tablet and the brush tool as usual. With the Smudge and Erase tools being used for touch up. The gradient background was done using GIMPs gradient tool and touched up with the Brush tool. This was done to take all I've learned and relearned about light and color and practice applying it. This was also to show how all character, NPC, and Boss/Enemy portraits might be designed for this project from this point on until I've mastered Scene composition, any background I draw will only be a distraction no matter how little the detail is despite how much I've study this subject in particular. As for the anatomy everything should be corrected. The issue that may arrive are are legs and the way they are positioned. I wasn't able to find a proper model reference for this after days of searching so I went with a different method of using different images of similar leg poses to figure that out. So it might be a bit off. I won't know for sure until after critiques in.
Also yes when I say I'm studying and practicing, I mean the basics through advance lessons. from basic shapes and anatomy, to depth, Color & Values, hue shifting, reflective light rendering, tangents and scene composition, ect. This is still an on going process and despite the 9 years of study and practice I still have more to do. This is to see where I sit at this moment base on what I've learned so far and to see my improvement rate so far, and what I was and wasn't able to execute properly.
Total Layers used: 46 out of 52 layers with no masks used. A much smaller number compared to my previous average of 120+ layers.
