Finished Pisces Calendar Piece

Wow, so this turned out pretty well!

Granted, I had a decent amount of time to work on it. Still, I count it as a success and possible entry into my cartoon portfolio.

Pisces Calendar Piece

While I'm currently enthralled with a few oil paintings, I'm also doing my best to build up a style for my digital work. Specifically a cartoony looking style that can be used for just about any context.

For being as cartoony as it is, there is actually a surprising amount of time put into something this simple.

Like anything, it starts with a slap-dash sketch. Just something to establish the gesture and rough layout of the piece.

After that I roughed out  few more comps before I came up with a general idea of what I wanted the layout to be.

After working through the comps the line-work fell into place pretty easily.

Next came blocking in colors, which is not my strongest suit. The key was I wanted to establish a "fluorescent" color scheme and make sure that a single color didn't stand out too much from the rest. It was a lot of back-and-forth.

After that, I blocked in a couple of the shadows and highlights to arrive at where I am now.

It's getting close to where I want it, but not done yet. I have yet to play around with the gradient tool to smooth out and homogenize the piece. Until then I can see the piece going in the right directing and I look forward to spending a decent amount of time on the polishing of the final product.

I'll post when it's finished, here's some other work I did in the meantime: