During Anthrocon 2010, I had three commissions in the Artist's Alley. At the time, I hadn't thought of carrying a USB-powered flatbed scanner with me to scan my commissions. Instead, I used my digital camera to photograph the sketch. Well, anyone who has done this knows the results aren't anywhere near as good as a scanner. When I ran across these photos, I concluded that they weren't presentable as taken. So I improved them.

Second of three is this one for  xanderfox, of his character "Sasha", a gargoyle. First time drawing one of those :)

As depicted, she's perched on a rooftop, observing goings-on below on the street. I had envisioned the pic as being a night scene, but didn't think of a method of reflecting that in the pencils, until I decided to clean up the photo for posting. Initially this was going to be a greyscale touch-up, but the presence of a color pic of Sasha swayed the decision in favor of a color image. So after extensive cleanup (meaning I dropped the pic into Inkscape for a crisp vector ink job), the pic was transferred to my trusty Picture Publisher for some nighttime color. Since the foreground is well lit from below, and Sasha is standing at the edge of the rooftop, I opted for minimal shadowing of Sasha, since she would be well-lit by the light source before her. At least that's my story :)

For the backdrop, I straightened out the buildings and added lights, varying the intensity of each row of windows to reflect some offices being brightly lit and some are dimmed (after all, it is nighttime), as well as the color variations of different office lighting. Finally adding some glow effects and stars high up in the darkest portion of the backdrop.

I guess this could be considered a "lottery" piece as it was originally commissioned as a pencil sketch and here it is a digital color extravaganza (well, as well as my coloring skills can manage). Let it be known that these aren't going to be commonplace--it took almost four years to post this in any form and the color work is mostly because a color reference was available. Once I'm done with the photographed sketches, there will only be clear B/W scans to post. Unless I like a given sketch so much that I want to see it in color.

Pencil on bristol inked with Inkscape, colored in Micrografx Picture Publisher. 13 layers not including attribution text. 180MB at full size