Midnight Chase

Back in September 2016 I did a piece for Colour Collective's 'Venetian Red' prompt. I really liked it, but it had a lot of flaws - my Colour Collective pieces usually do, I don't have the time to plan them out properly, so they're always a bit rough and ready. I thought it definitely had potential though, so throughout February I worked on a remake of it after finishing work for the day. I was completing some work books that were heavy on stranger-danger and online predators, so I felt the need to completely step away from such work before I went to bed. I wasn't enjoying that assignment!

I think it looks much better now, and is worthy of being in my portfolio. I used my original as a sort of extended rough and colour study, and this time around I spent more time fixing up my perspective and playing with different textures.

Here's a progress animation showing the evolution from original linework to finished piece:

I've been trying to keep more of the freshness of my sketched lines in my final pieces lately, so for digital work I've been experimenting with sketching as normal, and then going over those lines with colour, so that the original sketch is still visible. At the moment I'm quite liking the effect. Here are my original sketches of the figures, and some close-up shots from partway through the illustration (when the figures were pretty much done):

As you can see, I didn't bother much with the man's feet, as they were going to be completely obscured by the bridge anyway. I just needed to know roughly where they were so that he didn't end up looking like he was about to fall over. 

Here's a look at the two pieces side-by-side:

This was done in Adobe Photoshop CC on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2. It took somewhere between 20 and 25 hours, I think, over the course of January.