Here is some fanart I made of the character Achilles from the Hades video game. It's a piece of entertainment that's been keeping me really inspired and perpetually eager to return to. Thus it is only natural for me to create some art inspired by it!
The main focus while making this piece was for me to further my art direction and the kind of style and vibe that I would like to portray. For the character, I tried a new method of shading, which consisted overall of sharp, defined shadows which would then be toned down by a streak/outline of mid-tone colour, meant to create a softer transition between light and dark. However, no more actions would go towards blending the streaks, as I wanted to emphasize the structure and the planes of the character's physique. For the hair, I did blend the edges into the base colour a little, in order to achieve a softer, silky aspect.
Another valuable experience that I got out of this piece was learning to integrate a character in a background/environment. As I did not plan this piece to come out necessarily as a finished work, but rather a concept or practice piece, it was quite difficult to figure out where I wanted to go with it after the process of painting the character was finished. I tried out a bunch of effects, textures and colours and even ended up abandoning it altogether. But about a week later I was really bugged by having this painting that I've spent dozens of hours on just sitting unfinished on my computer. So I went in with a fresh set of ideas and tried a bunch of new things and eventually I settled on this monochromatic look. After some debating and another set of trial and failure, I even managed to add in those wave-like effects (which in fact I didn't really intend to make so watery!) that I think add a fair amount of dynamism to the overall piece.
Below you can see the sketch, lineart and base colours.
