Amazons (stages) (Patreon)

By a popular demand of 1 person I'm posting a coloring process of one of my pieces from last month. I'm not used to explaining things, so bear with me here and if you have any question — ask them below. :) Since most of my work is character centric and I rarely do backgrounds, usually I start working on characters first and come up with some simple background later to match the characters. However in this case commissioner asked me to use a space and stars as background, because they wanted me to implement those symbols in the background. 1) So after I sketched poses for Artemis and Diana I went on to combining a bunch of different space photos I found online into one, changing and moving different parts to better suit overall composition and applying colored filters on different layers on top of it all to make it purple-ier (because that was also a commissioner's request).2) This is just flat colors stage. Nothing special here.3) Then I proceeded to blocking in some rough shading. This is always going to be the most mentally draining and frustrating part for me personally, because at this point even though I'm trying real hard to keep it loose and just think about lights/shadows masses, my brain can't stop thinking about how ugly it looks overall. :D The thing I noticed lately is that I try to find this ratio of 'complexity of the pose/complexity of the lighting'. So basically if the pose itself is difficult and catches the eye, I'd put some pretty simple shading on top of it and call it a day, and vice-versa. In this particular case it's the latter. So my main goal remained simple: put the light on those parts where the focus should be (their faces and hands + some musculature, because why not?) and hide everything else in shadows. 4) After that I continued to 'sculpt' shapes with shadows. Usually I start with skin of the characters and then move onto everything else. I didn't use any references in this case and I rarely do so for my lighting, so this is all pure intuition. That's probably a bad practice, but on the other hand I kinda happy with results and myself most of the time. And here I included just one of the screenshots of that 'middle stage', but to make it clear: shading usually lives through dozen or so changes, so if I showed you every single layer of those, the post would have about 4 times the pictures. :)  5-6) Moving on to final steps, where figures are pretty much done and colors are matched with the background (I use 'Levels' tool for that). Here I added the symbols and some more stars in the background, so the symbols don't look too blatantly on top of everything (even though they still do, kinda, but that's the point). After that I usually save the picture, re-open it and make some minor changes here and there: tweak minor proportions mistakes, drop some Noise filter on top of it all and create some light chromatic aberration effect just to spice things up a liiiiittle bit. So there you have it. :)