After doing matte painting non-stop for a long period of time, I was happy when, at work, I had to go through a period of character concept. That period kind of re-awakened my love for character drawing... so right before the holidays I set off on a series of drawings / character art to try and push further my observation drawing, anatomy sketching, painting and illustration skills all together. The goal was also to figure out ways of speeding up my concept work.

I wish I could paint as tight as some of the artists on this board.. but I have a very short attention span / patience threshold when it comes to working on characters. So forgive the roughness around the edges... I tried to keep everything as spontaneous as I could.

I'm in a weird Luis Royo / Tim Bradstreet phase so the Winter Queen (and the rest of the images I posted in my portfolio from this set) is vaguelly inspired from the dark wastelands you can find in both thoses artists' art.

The work is mostly Photoshop based on a quick sketch and layout made from observation based on a small 200 pixel wide picture of Scarlett Johanson I found in one of my references folders. Used that picture because I like the pose and wanted to practice more realistic drawing (that was painfull... it has been so long since I had done any life drawing)... I also used a bunch of texture images from my matte image banks to speed up the texturing process.

From start to finish the image took me about 7 hrs to produce...

so what do you guys think !?
comments and critique are welcome... !!