My Young Apprentice

With the previous batch of characters out of the way, I was planning on holding off on another blog post for a while, but I've been drawing another picture and I love the way it's turning out so much that I wanted to share some WIP pictures.

That means another character introduction.

About three years after our primary timeline, Jesse becomes a knight and takes on a padawan, a young balosar named Jason Del'marino, or Chase for short. Chase was found by the Jedi at the age of eight in a technical academy on Coruscant, where his drug dealing parents had sent him to get him away from the life they lived. His aptitude for mechanics endeared him to Jesse long before he became his padawan, but their Force skillset is somewhat different: while Chase is mentally competent, his real talent lies in Force movement abilities like jump and especially speed, which is where his nickname came from.

For the picture, I wanted to follow this tutorial which seemed like the natural progression from my current cartoony, heavily lined style to a more subtle, realistic one. I'm not exactly following the tutorial since it's rather specific to the picture, but I am using the general method, and I'm loving it! It takes sooo long, but the results are brilliant. I wanted to choose a similar pose and feeling to the example picture, partly to make it easier to follow and partly as a tribute to the tutorial's maker, and so I have an image of Chase several years into his apprenticeship re-doing his braid after a shower.

The first picture is my sketch referenced of a model I put together in MakeHuman a 3D posing program. In the second, I've done a quick practise colour to get the mood right and took colours from that to use as the flat base colours there. In the third, I've started blocking in the basic shading. (He's not going to look demonic in the finished thing!)

(Incidentally, if anyone's spotted the House reference in the names here, it was a totally random coincidence! I only got into House after the characters were named. Howsat for weird?)