Dinorider process - About Patience and Preparation

Its been some time already but while I am working on some NDA project, I wanted to share with you some behind the scene of the work I've done for Paul Scott Canvan mentorship. If you are looking to improve your skills and you focus on magic style work, I absolutely recommend it !

The brief was to create an mtg-like illustration of a heroes and their animal mount. I wanted to take this opportunity to work on some dinosaurs. A first time for me, but something I wanted to do in a long time ! After some iteration I decided to go for an old veteran and her therizinosaurus companion as a base, and started thumbnail, trying cool way to show she had a support function, and is helping others.

Following Paul's advice I choose the second one, that had a strong composition and could show a lot of what around, while needing good design to pass the storytelling - so a fun challenge to handle !

But before moving to more refined sketch, we needed to do some extra preparation steps (that are actually really useful and that I should do more often) : character design and some studies.

Then it was time to create the final sketch, starting first by sorting out colors and values.

Once that was sorted out, it was time to find and create references to help us with the painting phase. In addition to photo references I create a 3D models of the scene with Daz3D and Blender, and photobashing some sky and mountains in the background.

With all these new information, I was ready to do the final sketch.

And after that ? render, render a lot, most of the "hard" work was actually done upfront, allowing to focus on nice render. The composition and the design are solved, the refs are ready, its the advantage of this whole preparation process !

This was also my first time working with my new graphic tablet (and xppen artist 22), and it was really helpful for the lineart, sketch and first render phase ! But for detailed render I went back to my usual device - my ipad, as I am still not used to detail render on tablet.

And after around 50h it was done ! You can enjoy here some zoom in, along with the final one. Thank you for reading trough !