Stormtrooper Sketch

This art forum has been pretty quiet of late so I thought I'd contribute in some way, and post a picture.

I've been meaning to get into digital illustration for a while now but lacked the motivation and self-confidence to actually get cracking so here's my first attempt, a picture of the always cool Stormtrooper, a personal fave from my childhood and the outfit of which I would still love to have now :D.

This is my initial sketch which I'm intending to build up into some sort of digital painting and possibly get printed on a canvas or something. If anyone is interested, I'll continue to post my progress (as long as I don't balls it up that is) and would like to hear any feedback.

Stage 1: Sketch
http://i283.photobucket.com/albums/k...0px-Stage1.jpg

Wow, now that looks very good, great work and keep it up!

nice, i love anything star warsy :)

Even Phantom Menace? :)

Here's my next stage. After choosing a few tones and considering the lighting this is my first colour pass to establish these areas.
For anyone curious, at this stage I'm roughing in the tones with a hard round brush in photoshop. I'm using an aging G4 iMac with a small A6 Graphire 2 tablet by Wacom so I can apply my strokes more freely.

Stage 2: First rough colour tones
http://i283.photobucket.com/albums/k...-400px-pt2.jpg

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/...31/jazz460.jpg
Nice!

Thanks for the feedback guys. I hope someone might find these steps useful or at least make them want to have a go themselves. It would be nice to see more of peoples' artwork on these forums.

Here's my 3rd stage. I've worked on the darker areas first as a part of a second pass. No reason why, probably because there was less area to do at the time and I was feeling lazy.

My initial strokes on my first pass were very quick and free so I'm tightening it up a bit now. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing at this stage but I'm gonna carry on and see how it turns out. I don't want it to look too airbrushed (I want some strokes to be visible) which is why I'm solely using hard round brushes.

http://i283.photobucket.com/albums/k...-400px-pt3.jpg

For those interested here's my initial reference pose I cobbled together, made from photos of a bobble head Stormtrooper figure, a shot of me holding a dreamcast light gun, a body figure from my childhood toys (one of the very few Star Wars figures I kept unfortunately) and a 3D render of the blaster taken from a model I found on the web. Having this made the sketch a lot easier, essentially more of a tracing.

http://i283.photobucket.com/albums/k...-400px-pt0.jpg

My next stage, I've just added detail and shading to the blaster at this point.

http://i283.photobucket.com/albums/k...-400px-pt4.jpg

Hmm, that's looking better and better each time, keep the updates coming!

Thanks Shrygue, here's my 5th stage.

I've tightened up my virtual paint strokes this time and given the whole white armour and helmet a good repaint to neaten it all up. For anyone curious, I'm still using photoshop's standard hard round brushes, nothing fancy. I'm varying the opacity of the strokes depending on if I want a hard edge or a more layed effect by using a brush at say 20% opacity and building strokes up on top of each other. Most strokes have probably been done with either a 20 or 50% opacity with some smoothing out between shades with a 10% setting.

I've also added extra details like dimpled grip marks on the blaster handle and a few extras to the helmet like the blue stripes and grilles for the microphone tip areas. These aren't particularly apparent here due to the size of the image though.

http://i283.photobucket.com/albums/k...-400px-pt5.jpg

No way. . .

:|