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 Walkthrough
About the author Shahir Shakir (24) majored in graphic design, but his real passion is character illustration - "to tell a story or convey a subject’s personality through visual imagery." Drawing has been a pleasure of his since he was very little, but he only started digital art in 2002. He says he still is in the learning process, experimenting with different styles, methods, and techniques, varying his concepts and pushing himself to overcome new challenges. Shahir currently works as a freelance graphic designer, and plans to move on to IT as a "...means to develop my expensive hobby." His dream is to work in the entertainment industry or to produce a graphic novel of his own someday; he would also like to do cover art for comic books. "The road will be long, but I have a feeling that at least one of these will become a reality if I work hard enough!" Step 1: ConceptUsually when I think about designing a new character I look towards existing ones to take inspiration from and additionally pay tribute to in some way. This is one of my preferred methods to keep it simple because it enables me to be more complex later on which is honestly more comfortable rather than doing it the other way around. For the purpose of this walkthrough I decided on a subject that has already existed in my mind for several months but I had not yet fully defined. Basically I wanted to present my own version of the Grim Reaper in a stylized way. Since this character was still fresh out of the factory I didn’t want to have anything set in stone just yet. Therefore I tried to keep things spontaneous and work around the character’s back story as I progressed with the actual image. As for the references, I was influenced by the main antagonist of Brom Stoker’s Dracula, Alucard from both the Hellsing anime and Castlevania video game and finally a couple of vanitas paintings for the symbolic aspects.  Step 2: ThumbnailingThe first thing I do is rough out my original idea on paper while the image is still boiling hot in my head. Normally I’d come up with different pose variations and angles of the subject to choose from but I like how the first draft focused perfectly on the face, so I decided to stick with this as the main guideline. Once I find an area comfortable to start from (in this case, the head) the rest just needs to accompany it. Step 3: SketchingAfter that little warm-up I lightly redrew the image on a bigger sheet of paper using a 4H pencil, while being more conscious about some of the finer details like the fingers, the features on the face, how the hair falls on the shoulders, etc, etc. Every once in a while during this process I’d hold up the drawing to a mirror to check for mistakes. Next, I drew over the 4H guides with a fine tipped 4B mechanical pencil, keeping the lines neat as possible.   Step 4: CleanupOnce the initial lines were done I scanned the image at 300 px/inch resolution in Adobe Photoshop. The dark 4B lines showed up alright but the underlying 4H guides were barely visible if at all which actually makes for easy cleanup. I went to Level Adjustments (Image > Adjustments > Levels... or Ctrl+L) to manually increase the contrast. Then I used the dodge tool (O) instead of the eraser to eliminate most of the unwanted grays in certain areas. At this point I saved the image to my hard disk (always alternate between 2 or more save files every few minutes). Note the differences between this version and the concept sketch from Step 2. I put a feather on the hat for added flair, left the cape out and added an additional pair of arms that was supposed to rest on a cane which I’ll add digitally. Step 5: Line Art PreparationThe next thing I wanted to do was to separate the lines from the white background. For added flexibility, to edit the lines rather than set them to multiply mode and paint under them, I used the load channel as selection option under the channels palette. This will select the white spaces in the image so that hitting the delete key will make them disappear, leaving only the pencil lines. Note: Before undertaking this step a copy of the image was created and pasted into a new layer while the original background layer was filled with white.  Step 5bAfter executing the previous step I was left with a thin semi-transparent effect on the lines, so to rectify this I went back to the layers palette, chose lock transparent pixels and fill the layer with black (Edit > Fill). The line art will look exactly like the original but prepped for advanced tweaking. I won’t just use it as a guide for the painting process but rather combine it with other layers to maintain some texture.   Step 6: BackgroundNext I wanted to determine the mood and colour scheme. I imagined that the painting is going to be dark and gloomy (think Tim Burton’s films), so I started with selecting the background layer and filling it with a blueish gray hue. This also got rid of the very white background that was too bright on my monitor - it would’ve had a huge effect on color perception. I also resized the canvas to fit the subject into a more centralized composition. Nothing fancy, just keeping it simple. Step 7: PaintingThis next step was done on a third layer but placed just under the lineart above the background (set to overlay mode). When painting a character, I habitually focus is on the face - so that’s where I began. I started by laying in a flat midtone of the skin using a default hard round brush, before taking the opacity brush with a lighter hue to start bringing forth the values. For the darkest parts I used black to make the main areas pop out but keeping it subtle. The direction of the main lighting must be considered at this stage. 
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