Process Art (Patreon)

Today I have a couple series of process images--one for a Legend of Zelda fanart and one for a commission.

Legend of Zelda Fanart
My process for this piece was fairly standard, but I did everything out of order. I usually start with the sketch, create a color thumbnail, then do the final piece, but in this case I started with the color thumbnail, then drew the sketch overtop of it. My reason for this was that I had a strong idea for an illustration and I wanted to test it out first before sketching. Additionally, I wanted this piece to be very low-detail, so the sketch wasn't too important. I planned on improvising as I painted.
I painted the thumbnail for this piece over a month ago, but I didn't get around to sketching and finishing it until last Friday. It is very rare for me to have a WIP sitting around for so long, but I was busy drawing a piñata girl. To make sure I wouldn't forget about this piece, I set the color thumbnail as my background. I'm now thoroughly sick of looking at it.

Commission
For this commission, I was tasked with rendering an arcade at a tricky angle--or at least, I felt that doing it at this angle would best fit the client's request. It's a fisheye lens view, which can be drawn by hand using five-point perspective, but that is very difficult. Instead, I built the scene using Blender, then rendered it using a fish-eye lens camera. I then drew the characters overtop the rendered image. I still had to draw them in perspective though, so I created a 3D perspective grid as a guide, which was achieved using three cylinders--a very fun trick.
From here, I realized that rather than tracing over the 3D render, I could just separate the different pieces of the render, creating shapes to paint on--saving a lot of time. I did some cleanup and added some simple filters to make the shapes match my brush texture, but besides that, it's all pretty much unaltered. Some parts I felt were too perfect looking, so I did intentionally put in some perspective errors to make it feel slightly less like a videogame screenshot.
With everything set up, I created a color thumbnail and set to work rendering out the scene. For the carpet, I wanted one of those classic arcade patterns, but there was no way I was gonna draw it in perspective. Instead, I created a texture and placed it in the 3D scene. Blender did a much better job than I ever could!
The Dessert Planet easter egg was a request from the client.