I got sick of people saying/suggesting that my graphics have stolen line art or whatever.
Just so you all quit with the accusations, I am posting the process of creating this new sig (sorry about the big name tags everywhere but I don't want the line art stolen):
STEP 1:
GROW THE IDEA IN YOUR HEAD. My idea was of a stranded mermaid. Then go and look at photos of people laying on their stomach in google images to see where the hands may naturally sit. One single photo isn't copied, but a bunch are used as inspiration for hand & face postures.
STEP 2:
Start to draw out the line art for the idea once you have an understanding of where things should be drawn. I do this by using Layers. I put my body line art in the bottom layer and hair line art in the top layer. This way when you go back to re do the hair you don't have to be careful with an eraser. This image has my detailed body line art layer with my messy hair line art layer on top. The body line art took ages with lots of erasing parts and trying again.
STEP 3:
Move onto the hair line art, to define the hair line art when I already have messy hair line art what I do is I create a new layer on top of the old hair line art layer and go over it in fine detail with a small 1px brush. This usually takes FOREVER. This is how it looks when you delete the old messy hair line art:
STEP 6:
Dark colouring. Again, I created a new layer on top "colour 1" and called it "colour 2". I set the brush opacity fairly high and used a darker brush as this layer will pretty much be the canvas for the colours.
STEP 7:
Darker colouring and starting to bring in textures. As before, I created another layer for this step. I darkened up the base colours once more as the next colours will all be lightening and texturing. This layer is also where I put down the first textures for her tail. Which was just a basic reptile skin texture.
STEP 8:
This is where I did the detail skin texturing. This was done in a new layer with an opaque brush. This step took a lot of time. As you can see I tried to make her skin look like it has not seen much sun (as a mermaid would live in a part of the sea where man can not see), so I made her pale with visible blue & purple veins.
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