These series of sketches are loosely inspired by Ender’s shadow, the sequel to Ender’s game. I had a lot of free time over the holidays and was able to produce a large painting with the help of my new scanner. I had an idea in my head for some time of what I wanted to draw and started to do a few thumbnail sketches to try and figure the composition.

Thumb nailing, which is something I do while animating all the time, really helped me explore ideas to find the right poses for all the characters.

I then redrew my small layout thumbnail onto a letter size paper 8.5 x 11.

I didn’t like how far the right hand character was from the two foreground figures, and the facial expression on the center character wasn’t working. So I scanned it into the computers and did some touch ups in Photoshop.

From there I printed it out and did a watercolor pass to get some idea of the colors I wanted to use. I scanned that sketch back in and painted over it some more to give me this color study.

I then blew up the pencil drawing and redrew that on an 18 x24 piece of Strathmore coldpress using my light table.  I ended up changing the face so he didn’t look so scared. Then the painting process began.

Finished painting

After a few color correction tweaks here’s the final piece.