Ivan Sivachov (also known as Zaasd) is a Freelance 2d Artist (open for commissions), from Latvia. In this great piece he shares his creation process of 'The Behemoth,' a 2D finalist for Art War 2. 

This was the biggest project I ever participated in so I tried to outdo myself this time. It mentality pushed me to learn a couple of things during the process that I am willing to share now. However, there were also plenty of mistakes I made approaching this kind of long term illustration, so in this tutorial I will try to show both sides of my process with the hope that people wouldn’t fall in the same traps I did.

Idea

Before even starting to draw I took a minute to think about what kind of character I wanted to create. I decided that it has to be epic and massive boss like creature. Usually in video games and movies “bad guys” fall for these kind of characteristics so I chose the dark side in this war. Also I wanted to draw a reckless killer type of dude and light side doesn’t seem to be fitting for that role. 

After choosing the side I realized that one thing I want to avoid is repeating someone else’s concept because it’s hard to impress anyone with another generic zombie or dark knight.  So I decided to look into the nature for inspiration. After a while I saw some photos of a hippo and thought that this massive beast is brutal enough for my art and started sketching. 

Of course I had to change the regular hippopotamus a little bit so it will look more interesting and fresh. I came up with an idea of “hippo centaur” which seemed cool and new to me and I drew some thumbnails for it. In these thumbnails I was trying to roughly define the design and pose of my character. They are extremely loose and not looking good at this point but they helped me to figure out what works and what doesn't for my concept. I chose the last one for my final illustration because It shows most of my characters body while looking powerful and dynamic. It also has some room for additional characters and environment. Also I liked the idea of flail flying into the camera on the foreground.

Afterwards I drew my character again in more of a static pose to define my characters design even more. And the first mistake i did was jumping into the final illustration too early and not developing my characters design further. 

It is important to know what you are drawing before you start rendering it. 

By keeping the concept that loose I sentenced myself to endless guessing- what I am trying to achieve during the rendering process? It takes way more time to define your design in a dynamic pose with foreshortening than in a schematic static one.

Next step was to create value thumbnails  which helped when figuring out which lightning setup fits my composition best. I also cropped out some of the background so my hippo would take up as much space as possible and appear bigger.  I liked the idea of the dark character blocking the light coming from behind it. It made my demonic hippo look even gloomier than it was. Then I quickly colorized it using a quite cold color scheme. Now it was time to render.

Rendering

I started off with deciding that I am going to have cold diffused light coming from the front and some hot sunlight coming from behind. I then focused on my “hippo centaur’s” anatomy because my sketch was quite messy and I wanted to see something more defined. I decided that it is going to have human’s muscular arms so it would be able to wield its gigantic flail efficiently and because it’s a hippo he simultaneously must have some sort of fat on its belly. 

Next step was realizing that the belly was looking stupid and weak as hell, so I have changed it to some sort of weird fat-filled 6-pack. This stage took me quite a bit of time because as I previously said I didn’t invest enough time in design part of the illustration and tried to render stuff that wasn’t there. 

There was a lot of guessing on how to make this character look powerful not funny.  At this point, I was looking at tons of anatomy references both humans and hippos so my design would look functional and confident.  Even though it’s just a creature it still needs to be logical. 

I realized that it has to have wider hips for supporting the massive upper part of the body so I had to repaint stuff again. I also started to add little details to the skin. At first it was hard for me to figure out how to make skin look cooler and more detailed. I decided to study some photos of wounded in battle hippos. Only then did I realize that they usually have a lot of scars and bumps and that even without them their skin surface is far from smooth and has a lot of micro wrinkles (dark spots, etc.) 

I then started to approach details more like a 3D artist who creates details by using bump maps and texture maps and added a lot of small hand painted bumps, bulges and scars on top of the basic form. I also added some textures like lighter and darker dots with a little bit different hue. This stuff makes your painting look rich and juicy. 

After I finished rendering my hippo I started paying more attention to the background and secondary characters. Most of the stuff I have painted here (like spiky rocks or water splashes) 

I have never painted before, It was a real struggle for me to make it look somewhat decent. My advice here is not to give up and study references until you achieve desired result. Often less experienced artists, like me, paint something quite abstract and blurry and keep it that way when they don’t know how something works. 

Being in this competition forced to push my boundaries and actually learn stuff instead of relying on blur and other cheap tricks. I can say that this mentality of being willing to make the best artwork you can, makes you learn much faster. Because this way you have a vision of what you want to achieve and it leads you to start thinking of what you need to learn to achieve it instead of randomly learning something and not using. 

Setting this simple and clear goal may help you improve faster. Instead of abstractly thinking “I need to get better at drawing” think of it like “I need to get better at drawing rocks, clouds, water etc.”. Divide your path into the smaller steps. 

Last step was adding little things like the waterfall into the background to make the main character pop, people throwing rocks to create even more drama, saliva to make him look more alive, some bloom effects using “screen” layer mode and so on. 

Overall my rendering process is quite basic, everything here is hand painted mostly with one basic Photoshop’s brush and I also didn’t use any tricks like photobash or 3d software.  Maybe this was the reason why it took me so long to finish (40 hours+) also wish I would have invested a little bit more time into the earlier stages so I wouldn’t have to repaint stuff all over again!

While it is definitely not the best artwork humanity ever faced, it is definitely best artwork I could pullout with the time I had. I did improve a lot during this contest and I recommend everyone to try themselves out in the similar contests once in a while. It is a really great motivator! Also I am honored to be one of the finalists among other great artists! Hope I did not bore you to death with my wall of text and many of you found my insights useful.

Thanks for your attention!

Best Regards

Ivan

Follow Ivan's full process as it happened in the Cubebrush forums.