1. Conceive and outline
In order to highlight the comic effect of this scene, I rendered the lute in a very detailed way, while for the donkey, I used a more exaggerated and indulgent approach to create a sharp contrast between the two. Here is how it was made: The donkey was very interested in music, so he went to a very famous musician and said to him: "Please teach me this art so that I can play the lute like you do." ”
"Ah, dear little donkey," replied the musician, "it is so difficult for you. Your fingers don't seem to be quite suitable for playing the lute, they are too big. I think the strings of the lute are too big for you." Maybe it won’t last.” But no matter what the musician said, he could never convince the donkey. The donkey had made up his mind to learn how to play the lute. Thanks to the donkey's hard work and eagerness to learn, he finally succeeded and now he can play as well as a musician.
Initially, I just made a rough sketch, about 4" x 5", so that the general frame was almost complete. I used a scanner to scan the image into Photoshop to make final adjustments.
On a whim, I drew the donkey's head as if it was slightly raised and shaking, and later I found that the effect was really good.
To embellish the sketch, I lowered the opacity of the scanned layer and used custom brushes in Painter (IX) to quickly paint on multiple layers. The strokes mimic the texture of a pencil.
Next, I made an overlay, estimated the shadow projection direction and the direction of the light source, and created the shadow part of the donkey. I experimented with different lighting angles to make sure the projection didn't steal the spotlight from the main character.
2. Rough coloring
First, in Painter, set the tone to orange, so that the background has the texture of canvas. I use the brush that comes with the software. In this way, the picture looks a little lively and has a sense of space. So the main color is basically finalized.
Then, in Photoshop, draw a solid area based on the orange, and place the area layer between the orange base layer and the outline layer.
3. Rough painting
Stack all the layers and use a striped bristle brush to quickly paint over the main areas with a sharpness (zoom level) of about 25% so that the size of the entire image matches the size of the screen. In this process, both the pencil and the original canvas tone become one with the paint. I put the drop shadow on a separate layer that I'll adjust later.
4. Modeling and detail drawing
I kept building the structure and adding details. Once the scene is fully established there is no need to continue adding more details. Making more adjustments and additions to the image later on is just a waste of time, mostly because it means adding more ingredients that I will add back in the final mix. On the contrary, if there are too few adjustments and additions, it will not be enough to establish the scene and fail to meet the needs of scene information.
