Duck Goblin Breakdown

Here's a little breakdown of a character painting that I finished yesterday:

It's very simple compositionally (which is what I had intended, since it's meant for a DTIYS challenge), but there are still interesting decisions and considerations that had to be made.

Choosing a pose that serves your intention - intention is everything

When you're working on whatever subject, be it an environment, a character or a creature, there are obviously ways to make it more or less readable. If you make something unreadable on accident, that is very bad. You must be very clear about your intention for the painting - and one aspect of intention is readability: do you want the viewer to realize what's going on right away, or do you want them to take a few moments to figure it out? How clear do you want different things to show up in relation to eachother? The questions seem very obvious but most beginners don't think of them consciously and thus create bad decisions that don't serve the intention of their painting.

So, this guy's main thing is that he's wearing a duck pelt. A duck is most recognizable from profile, and I wanted my character do be recognizable pretty instantly, so I was trying to be conscious of that while sketching.

Here's an example of a sketch pose that I did that wouldn't really serve me as well as it should:

As you can see, the character's feet are foreshortened in such a way that it would  take a bit to figure out + the arm foreshortening really doesn't serve any purpose other than it looks cool. The jar is a bit too close to the end of the beak, which is almost a tangent, and if I were to overlap those, the beak wouldn't read as a clear silhouette. The beak is also overlapping the goblin's nose a bit, making that harder to read. So, even though I would have liked to paint a more dynamic, foreshortened pose, I had to scratch that one and make something more flat and recognizable. If I had not been thinking about my intention consciously, I might have impulsively chosen this pose, and If you stack up many impulsive and intentionless decisions, you get a weak, pointless image. You gotta learn to scratch sketches (or worse, paintings in progress) that don't serve your intention. The sooner you throw out something that isn't serving your intention, the less pain you're going to cause yourself down the line

Using light and color for composition - focal points

Here's a breakdown of my thought process when coming up with this guy's light and color. Keep in mind that knowing the rules of light is only a small part, and that you must continuously bend the rules to your intention. The fundamentals serve you, not the other way around. It doesn't really matter what something would actually look like, but what you can get away with to create your desired effect. The clearer your intention is, the easier is this to grasp.

I used the beak almost as a light source in itself. and it also gave me a nice opportunity to play with some light effects, as the light was going through the beak and filling up that nose shadow.

If you're uncomfortable with painting certain light scenarios, a decent way to go about it is painting it in a neutral or warm light, like this WIP shot:

and then adding color balance, multiply, soft light and other adjustment layers to get your desired atmosphere. It also helps to do some actual color picking and overpainting after you've done this, to enrich the colors and make it less mechanical.

Hope this was helpful; I plan to do more of these for my paintings. Feel free to ask any questions or give suggestions in the comments and remember, intention is everything!