Dwarf, Human, Elf

This week our task was to draw a Dwarf, Elf and Human with specific proportions. The Dwarf would be 5 heads and around 5 ft, however I made him 4, the Human 8 heads and 6 ft, and the Elf 9 heads and 6.6 ft.

I used references throughout for the Elf and Dwarf, and occasionally for the human. I also grabbed a skin colour pallet. I used the reference for proportions, I also used them for foot and hand shape, colour and to get an idea of how the armour/clothing for these creatures is usually designed.

My base sketches I drew as what would lay underneath the clothes. I worked out the proportions here, such as leg length, hand size and others. For the Dwarf the legs where difficult, as they are usually presented short but quite far apart. The Dwarf did initially have a point where his legs ended, however it was erased, to measure the number of heads I mostly used the Photoshop grid, apart from with the Elf. It was quite difficult drawing the right poses with the different proportions, it would have been better to get a more natural form for each of the characters.

After importing my sketches into Photoshop or creating more layers I worked them up until I had characters with form and armour, using my references to help. I added the details in here before moving on to the values, lighting and colour. The most obvious thing the didn't go well here is the feet on the human, which look slanted to one another.

On the painting I started by adding the skin colour, from there I added the value in Grey-scale of each piece of clothing, I then added to colour to the clothing, after that I used an overlay layer with both black and white to create cell-shaded lighting and shadow. After this I created another normal layer in order to add extra pieces if lighting, blend the shadows and edit the colour where I wanted to. The lighting on the characters is fairly basic but makes them readable, one thing I need to improve on is giving a metallic look to the armour.