Personal Practice- Sora from KH

As I seem to keep going back to a cartoony style of working, I wanted to take some time to learn a different working method on Photoshop, as a lot of my peers in University do a more traditional painting style, whereas I scan in sketches and colour them in.

I found a really useful tutorial on how to begin to learn digital painting, by practicing from actual pictures first. Here's the page containing the tutorial, which I found incredibly useful. I decided to use one of my favourite video game characters, Sora (from Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts series) to practice with.

I was extremely pleased by the outcome, although I can see room for improvement. Here's the process in stages:

Here's the original image of Sora, by Japanese concept artist Tetsuya Nomura.

I added rough 'blobs' of the main shapes in the image first.

I then added the more smaller shapes in the image, and started added basic shadows and lighting.

I got more advanced with the shadows and the shapes in the image and started to flesh it out in terms of lighting and form.

The finished painting. I was going to do what I always do and do cartoony outlines all over it, but I hated the way it looked and realised that those two styles didn't really mix that well. So I went ahead with a pure painting technique and added highlights to lots of areas.

After this, I wish to do one more practice on another of my favourite characters: the Krites from the 'Critters' horror film series, in order to perfect this technique as the one above is my first attempt. I hope to use this technique when doing the concept art for my Game On! brief, as the cartoony style of my current work doesn't fit in properly.

A sketch I did of a Krite, a furry porcupine-like carnivorous alien from the 'Critters' film series. I want to use this as a basis of a new digital painting practice session to help with my Game On! brief.