Dolphin Picture Behind the Scenes (Patreon)

Here's a quick behind the scenes look at my art process. For the cover of my third book, I wanted to do something more whimsical. What about Magic players riding dolphins? After a few sketches, this is what I came up with.

I then digitally inked over this sketch, to come up with the following line art:

Removing the sketch and adding the title, the final cover looked like this:

Later on I decided to try making a playmat out of this design. This meant I first needed to extend the art to be the right dimensions for a playmat. The updated line art looked like this:

Then it was time to begin coloring. When coloring, first I don't worry too much about the exact colors I'm using. I just want to fill all the main areas of the artwork--a process called flatting. Here's what the artwork looked like at this step:

Once this is done, I can now adjust the individual colors more carefully and also add shading. First, I shaded the characters and dolphins. This one was especially fun to shade because I added orange and purple tints to the highlights to make it look like the sunset is being reflected. I also added simple gradients to the water and sky to get their basic colors set.

Next I shaded the splashing water more carefully. You can see that in some places I replaced the black lines with colored lines to give a softer feel to some of the edges.

Finally, I added more shading and texture to the water and sky to get this final picture for the playmat.

I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look. This playmat isn't currently available as a Patreon reward, but if you're interested in getting a copy, DM me and I'll see what I can do.