Marine Boudry works as a compositing artist in 3D animation and video games in Tokyo. She has a Master's Degree in CG Direction and is hoping to become an Artistic Director one day. For this challenge, she wanted to represent France–her home country.

She focused a lot on character design because she believes that a strong concept is the best thing you can do to help yourself create a nice image.

Character Design

My first thought was to make a Mecha-gargoyle and a Female Pilot. I did a full session of "warm-up" sketches of them and moved on!

I like to do that with my first ideas because it gets me inspired and since it doesn't take much effort I can really let my mind go. As a rule, I don't get attached to my first idea because it is almost always the shallowest.

Through this step, I felt something for one of the designs and it brought me to the idea of mixing the pilot and the gargoyle together.

Research and References

Before work, I always create a reference board. And this board will be next to me during the design process. Inside I gather all the accessories, clothes, weapons, and environment that reminds France. I also wrote keywords that would lead my design.

Always work with references, it will make your life easier.

To help me out in the process, I thought a lot about the personality of the character.

I wanted a character that represents what is it to be a hero. And for me, a hero has a strong mind, a strong will, and great physical abilities or knowledge. Someone who works hard and never gives up.

This is how Marianne the Wild rooster is born!

A woman who lost her legs in a previous battle, but instead of giving up and retire she made something good out of it and replaced her legs with super robotic legs that make her the deadliest warrior of the nation.

From the design to the final illustration, I keep in mind 3 principles and few keywords:

• CONTRAST
• BALANCE
• HARMONY

Keywords that Define the Character

Contrast, balance, and harmony will be for shapes, materials, details/rest areas, but also colors, values and composition. Drawing an illustration with a character that was designed before can be overwhelming. 

But if you pay attention to these 3 principles, you will get there!

Silhouette Exploration

For the silhouettes, I focused on the types of legs and the clothes. Since I called this character the Wild Rooster and her strength is speed, I wanted to stay on the topic and work around bird shapes with a lot of feathers and light-weighted silhouettes.

Contrast-Balance-Harmony

We should already have an adjective for the character: does the silhouette look slow? fast? magic? devilish? proud?

At this step, I worked on the contrast between the main shapes.

I balanced the masses of the character by alternating big and thin shapes while thinking about the distribution of weight.

For a believable/good design, the character needs to have his weight balanced, otherwise, it will look wrong.

Character Design

I picked 2 silhouettes that seem to have potential and I painted roughly some clothes. It helped me to narrow down to one silhouette in no time and be ready to work on the design.

The Clothes

This time I worked with metal, feathers, and fabric in order to remind the warrior and rooster attributes.

This combination of materials works well because it gives me contrast!

Light doesn't react the same way on all the materials. This is because materials have different roughness, specular, and gloss properties.

It goes the same way with the properties of the material itself, is it fur? skin? silk? feathers? 

I always create a character with different materials, it enriches the design a lot.

Once I have found the materials and colors that I want to use, I organize them on the character. For example, I used most of the gold near the head because this material will shine and attract attention. 

I also used a small panel of colors and values because it can quickly become messy and confusing when it's time to make the illustration!

Further Explorations

I liked version 1 but the area of the head was too aggressive. Since the other versions seemed more suited for my design, I mixed 3 designs together.

Final Details

Eventually, the French beret brought some more realism to the design than the helmet. And by keeping the ponytail I saved the dynamism that I had with the initial version.

Now that the final concept of the character has been locked, I could move on to the design of the back, weapons, and effects.

An extra step consists of drawing the face through different angles. It is usually for the production of the character but I like to do it because it helps a lot at the stage of the illustration.

Illustration

The challenge in the illustration was to show at least 80% of the character in a horizontal format.

Thumbnails

This step helped me to estimate the amount of work I needed for the different backgrounds and effects, but also to work on the contrast-harmony and balance of the image.

Thumbnails are perfect for testing the composition and the balance of values/shapes.

The Illustration

Once I have picked my thumbnail, I rescaled it to my final format and roughly painted some colors on top. It gave me a base to work on and kept me focused on my original concept. I also refined the dynamism of the composition and redraw the character using references.

I pushed as much as possible the focus on the feet and the head because they are actually the key designs of my character.

Lineart

Linearts are my thing. I just love it.

I also benefit a lot from it because once the lineart is done, I don't need to think about the shapes or design of the elements anymore.

Base colors + Background

I always paint the background first. It doesn't have to be final yet but enough to give me the mood of the illustration.

By painting the background first, I visualize more easily my lighting setup on the character.

Lighting

Next, I worked on the textures and the main light. Usually, I use several layers set to overlay for the light and multiply for the shadows. It allows me to push the lighting when I need it to be stronger.

While I am working on the character, I still keep adjusting the background. This way I keep them in harmony with each other.

Effects

Since the effects are affecting a lot the lighting. I moved onto painting them. For the painting of the effects, I mainly mix brushes and layers in different modes until I get a result that I like. Then I added some bounced red light on the elements of the background and the bottom of the character. This is a good way to integrate the effects in the illustration.

Post-Process

In the previous steps, I would adjust Background and Character separately. But here, I adjust on top of both. This is a good technique to immerse the character in the environment. After I locked all my colors and checked that everything was looking good. I added some chromatic aberration, grain, black vignette, and optical flare.

Final Illustration

This is my illustration for Marianne the Wild-rooster

Thank you to everyone who supported me during this challenge. This was an amazing experience, I enjoyed sharing my process with a community during these 3months.

Drawing can be a very lonely hobby. But I believe that this time, I opened up a little more to people!

Follow Marine here.