Process – Leon and Mathilda

So a little bit ago, I upgraded from my teeny Bamboo tablet to a Wacom Bamboo Connect pen and tablet, a trade for a drawing. The gent that traded me the tablet wanted fan-art for “Leon the Professional”.  A challenge, to be sure!

First of all, I’ve never been great at likeness. I’ve since been practicing a lot with it, but it’s still a big challenge.  Second of all, I wasn’t sure what I could bring to this piece. I wanted to come up with something cool and moody, but  this is kind of out of my element.   I played around with different sketches until I realized I wanted to capture this scene:

First concept felt very flat to me.

At this point, I thought this was a decent composition so this is what I went with.

I loved working on this, and I took my time at it, because I wanted to be able to sit back every so often and try to stay objective.  I know I could improve on posing, and the the overall composition with it, these are lessons for other pieces down the line.

The final piece with details are in my gallery now.