My name is Roy Stein, and I am a CG artist and Illustrator based in London. In this short tutorial I want to give you a short walkthrough of the way I build up an illustration from start to finish. This image was created over 3 sessions and took approximately 15 hours to finish.
First stage, a subject matter - My process is to come up with an idea, then a color/mood theme, and then look for references to get my creative juices flowing… I collect images from all over, shoot stuff myself if needed, and then start sketching. Because I have a Wacom Cintiq at home, I paint on one screen, and have my references on the second, which is really nice. 
I use a hard default brush in Photoshop, and start building up the form. This stage is the most important to me because it locks the composition, movement and character. The other steps are basically refining that sketch.
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Second stage – Color Palette and Basic Shading - Here I chose a few colors that will help me dictate the overall color mood of the character. I was going for a very simple lighting scenario, almost like a diffused light box, that is located slightly to the characters left.
I wanted the character to have pinkish/peach overall color, which would create a very sweet feel. Created a new layer on top of the line art sketch, and with the same kind of brush went in with larger strokes and filled the main areas of light and shadow, using the color palette on the left. I kept a copy of the sketch with a 30% opacity on top of this new color layer to still give me the roadmap to where things are (you can obviously also do this with a multiply mode layer).
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Next, I tweaked the contour of her face and hips with the liquify tool, to get a better flowing shape. This step was also mainly tweaking and adding colors, more refinement to the highlights and shadow areas, and smudging it all together to get a more unified result. Slowly adding details of the hair and the face, and trying to keep the balance of dark and light. I decided to keep a very strong outline, to give a more of an old poster art feel.
I then shifted the entire piece value from pinkish to more of a dark peach color because now the new saturated pink hair color was getting too rich and distracting from the rest of the image.
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Next step - the hair in the previous stage was still too distracting to my taste, so I decided that the more detail I add to it will might blend all those curls back in. So I added some feather ornaments to the hair, and painted in a new set of eyebrows and a fake mole.
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Finally, created a simple background gradient, which complimented the color palette of the character and pushed it out a bit more. I still felt that the hair and character needed some more jewelry so I painted in some bows and bracelets, added a hint of her dress behind her because I felt it wasn’t clear she was holding a dress at all, and even a small parrot to make it a bit less serious, and that’s it… I hope you liked this short walkthrough, and hope it helped your process in some way. Happy Painting.
by Roy Stein, London Web: www.roystein.com
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