| This image is a character portrait of the Joker, a villain character in the Batman comics. I wanted to depict him in a quieter, more sinister moment, to try to show some of the "evil genius" quality that would make Batman consider him a serious threat. Part of the reason for that was that I'd seen a lot of really great interpretations of the Joker as a maniacal, in-your-face kind of character; I hadn't really seen ones done in a more subtle manner. With that in mind, I decided to try toning down some of the clown/white facepaint effect, and clothe him in a very conservative, almost 19th century style clothing. I also wanted to get away as much as possible from the very saturated, four color look of the comics but still stay true to the color scheme of the character design. |
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| 01 :: My first step was to think about color palette, since the character design aspect was going to be tied into the color treatment quite a bit. I knew the illustration was going to be fairly static in terms of the pose, and that the Joker's face would be the focal point. The colors there were going to be basically green for the hair and white with some red and purple influences in the face. I wanted to use the old faithful warm/cool and complementary color tricks to make a (hopefully!) vibrant yet subtle image. I used a warm dark color for the background, with kind of a yellow ochre feel - I planned to work with some of the cool colors in the face to play against that. The lighting scheme I had in mind was to have a main cool green/blue light hitting him from the upper left, and a subtle warm reflected light from below and to the right. This reflected light would relate to the background color, and tie the figure into the background. The initial blocking in stage was fairly simple, pretty much your standard head and shoulders shot. The colors at this stage were medium tones, and more or less the local color without too much influence from the light colors. I also wanted to hint at, rather than actually show, his normal "maniacal laughter" expression with some of the shapes in his face.
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| The next stages involved modelling the face a little more, thinking about how the light source would play on the planes of his face. I also tried adding a little more personality with the hand holding a cigarette. It seemed like a gesture that went well with the sort of Jane Austen "corset movie" feel I was trying to achieve - it gave him a sort of fey, elegant quality that suited the style of the painting.
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| At this point, I flipped the image - I've found it to be a useful technique for double checking your work. When I draw something on paper, I will often hold it up to the light to look at it "from the back" for the same purpose. Seeing it reversed can often show things that are a little off that you didn't notice earlier. I started working on other facial features, and then gradually began to notice that he seemed a little low browed or something. He was not conveying that sense of creepy hyper intelligence that would make him a worthy adversary. Using the Power of Digital Painting®
, I grabbed some pieces with the lasso tool (with a few pixels of feathering) and tried some creative scaling, distorting and arranging. The main move was to enlarge the top half of his face, to give him more forehead than chin. Try that with oils!
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| The basic idea was pretty much there at this point. I continued refining the lighting and colors, cutting the shapes in a little more thoughtfully. Another Concept Art 101 basic tenet is that you want to play up anything that makes your design "speak," and eliminate anything that doesn't contribute to the statement you want to make - it's all about making the initial read as clear as possible. After taking a break from it overnight, I still felt like he had kind of a big jaw for the character type. One thing I *did* want to keep from the comics' look and feel was that triangular shaped head. Working on conceptual design for the games industry has made me very conscious of shapes and profiles, and how those things affect the initial read of a character. I used more lasso tool to massage the chin shape to get that triangular look. Also at this point, I started concentrating on the secondary design elements, like the costume, cigarette and fingernails. He seemed to me to be a black finger nail polish type of dude, so I added that bit.
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| The last parts of the process involved tightening up some details, or losing some of the less important edges. Also, adding a bit more of the red-purple influences to parts of his face and hands, to try to live up to the initial ideas for the color palette. I added some red to the areas in the face and hands where blood normally collects (i.e. nose, ears, fingers, etc.). To follow the color scheme I initially planned, I tinted the reds toward the cool/purple side, although as in the image as a whole I tried to keep those moves subtle and somewhat desaturated. Also, I flipped the image back to its original orientation and applied a slight unsharp mask filter to crisp things up a bit. (final.jpg)
This image was painted on basically two layers in Photoshop 7.0. One layer was the background wash stuff, and the second layer, set on "normal," was the figure work. The only brushes used were the default round brushes, with opacity set to the pen pressure, and size dynamics off. The original image size is pretty big, 2400x3000 pixels, so that the image will hold up when printed on 11"x17" paper.
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