Calvin Seraphinus is a freelance illustrator and concept artist from Indonesia and is currently working at Ciayo, a local comic & games company. In this great digital art tutorial he takes us through the creation of his 2D Finalist piece, "Raguel: The Groom Who Dances."

Ideation

Everybody loves a good story, so I’m focusing on the story aspect for this piece. I’m particularly developing a concept for a relationship between characters.

There are many ways to search an idea: memories, experience, Pinterest..but I found it particularly interesting to look at your surroundings, finding stuff close to yourself. So I got my idea after strolling around my house. It was a wedding photograph of my parent’s wearing traditional western custom suit and dress.

Concept Sketch

I wanted to create a character concept that portrays a relationship based on the wedding theme so whenever a story pops out I just scribble it with whatever tools I have.

First there was a king with his ghastly wife that acts like a weapon, I felt like this was used in many fictional characters before. Secondly a vagabond sword master who was dragging around his ghost wife. My initial ideas are always bad so I just kept developing stories by taking notes of what’s interesting.

Gathering References

After I have a deeper story and clearer image for the character, I start to identify missing details.

First, I write out some of the key elements for the character: skulls, skeleton, undead, European wedding suit, dress. Along the way, I also found some interesting elements such as knight armor, chain and cloak. 

This way, I can create a more detailed concept of my characters. So I started to tweak stuff based on my taste and helpful advice from people on the Cubebrush forum.

Concept Designing

From gathered references, I started to combine it. The key element must standout in order to bring out the characters. I start with a loose sketch so it can be easily evolved through the concept without worrying too much about the details.

The concept is evolving according to visual elements and some thought for the characters such as story correlation, object effectiveness, ease for movement, emotion, material and other things you can empathize with.

Illustration workflow

I used standard workflow for the illustration and since I don’t do 3d, I hand painted all of my stuff. Starting with the thumbnail sketch to determine some poses, camera angles, compositions and maybe values.

After some sketching fun, I found the closest image with what I had in my head. It had a good composition, everything’s readable: they’re clearly dancing.

At this point I start to colorize it. I wanted to convey a personal tragic feel.

I created an indoor scene and I think it worked out. I rendered value in it, starting with a cloak, the skull, the bride and the church executioner.

The initial value render was satisfying, so I continue to render them while adding color. I’m achieved this using multiply, overlay, gradient map, and other layer styles. I want to convey the eerie and tragic part of this piece so I started to experiment with the color palette until I got a good one.

I felt like things were out of balance so I added some of the key highlights to improve the readability for the skull.

Blood splatter adds more balance and a nice replacement for the earlier rose petal. I started to brush the backgrounds further while being careful not to over-render. I also changed the yellow light to a green-ish one to further enhance the eerie feel for the piece. In this stage the illustration was almost finished but some things needed to be sorted out.

In this final part, I applied some color balance filter to further add contrasting to the characters from background elements, blurred some parts of the image to create sharpness contrast, added ArtWar watermark and it’s done.

I hope you enjoy the journey of this piece as much as I do and thank you for reading.

Check out Calvin's entry here.