Ewan - Bike Ride Progression

So this shows how CG progression usually goes from concept to completion.

1. The original concept art. Most CGs were conceptualized by other artists (not all - a few of them are my work start to finish). This one was conceptualized by my favorite of the four concept artists with worked with Lia Amari. Just the figures - no BG (though this one really didn't need a BG sketched into the concept art.

2. At this stage, I made some adjustments to her concept art to better visualize how I wanted the finished art to look. For one thing, Nora looked huge in comparison to Ewan. Her head without the helmet is about as big as Ewan's WITH the helmet. And considering he's nearly a foot taller than her, she should look way smaller.  I shrank her way down, as you can see.

I was also struggling to visualize the structure of Ewan's head under his helmet and really couldn't make sense of his pose. Using some references, I decided I needed to lift his head a little to have his pose make sense.

3. These are my rough lines. You can see that, in particular, I made a more changes to Ewan's pose as I kept trying to visualize what his head was doing under the helmet. Even though you can't see that part, it's important to draw it out (to at least some degree) anyway so you can make sure the anatomy makes sense. I also slightly changed his shoulder position as well. Nora, I kept mostly the same at this part. 

For them both, I obviously changed the face structure a fair bit as the concept artist has a much more anime-inspired style.

4. Clean lines! Cleaned up my rough sketch so I can make sense of the lines. A lot of people would have started coloring over the rough sketch but I like having cleaned up lines to work with so I don't have to worry so much about making corrections while I color. In this one, you can see just how different my lines are from where the concept art started!

5. Flat colors! I layered in one of our BGs and added some motion blur as well. For some CGs we draw in a simple background that fits the scene - for others, we use existing backgrounds with some degree of motion or field blur to them. Others are just flat colors behind the figure. It kind of just depends on the CG itself what we do for the background.

6. I've started to add shading! It's pretty amazing how different things look once you start throwing shading onto them.

7. At this point, my shading and coloring is all finished. Except for...

8. Adding some atmospheric effects. I dulled down the vibrancy just a little and added the effect of light coming from above. I also added some faint, very blurred motion lines at the foreground to help give the impression Nora and Ewan are also moving at a high speed. Of course, it's weird to have the background motion blurred, but not the figures, but since we need to see Nora and Ewan, we just have to compromise a bit.

So yeah! That's how we get from concept to finished CG. This one was easier in some regards because the poses are simple and you can't see as much skin - skin always takes me the longest to shade. Ewan is all hidden so it didn't take long to shade him at all.  =3

Hope this was interesting for you guys to see!