Secret Santa: Leo process

Oof fell off the train again for a while, still gonna be a while till I can confidently say I'm fully back online - but I'll keep trying on and off till then.

I won't dwell on it for too long this time but instead just jumpright into some extra info about the post itself:

Step 1 to 3 are all the usual straight forward things you'd expect, sketch around, start putting in flat color when you're satisfied with the gesture, add shading and light colors on top of it to get a vibe going.

Step 4 has a cleaner version of the sketch that was already done at stage 2, but I happened to not duplicate it before merging the layers - which leads me to the next point - Step 4 is where I merge the character-based layers.

I didn't have to do a cleaner version of the sketch tbh, I technically could've just used color, values and rough lines as base, but it's removes some of the work that goes into the rendering if there are less stray lines to clean up. Also gives you some guidelines on what to paint - sounds obvious - but it has its disadvantages and advantaged.
Tying yourself down to a sketched out blueprint will speed up the process, leave less room for error or blind guessing in terms of what the picture will look like in the end - more control - but it also is difficult to improvise or go wild with the painting.
Might not seem like a bad trade-off, but if you ever feel yourself frustrated about your paintings feeling "stiff" or lifeless, you can reconsider your art process, maybe there's room to become a bit more intuitive ( it can be a bit scary to paint without a clear plan tho tbf )

So step 5 is just scuplting out the details and hammering down the shapes more concretely from the building block I've laid out from step 1 to 4.

I technically could leave it there, but after this step I always avoid giving into the temptation of "just get done with it". Even just 20 more minutes of finicking and dabbling with adjustments can vastly change the look and feel of a piece.

So step 6, I lowered the amount of mid-tone contrast significantly, basically grouping together the value-tones within the face much more and added a more obvious color hue to the frontal light/shade. It makes the rendering look less busy, and allows the yellow accents stand on their own a bit better - Basically I'm making it easier to focus on the bits I want people to focus on - make sure hand and eye-areas are the ones high in contrast and sharpness.

Someday in the future, I hope I'll be able to do more of step 6 earlier in the process - be able to pick colors intuitively that dont have to be adjusted with filters or sliders later on, and plan for the contrast distribution early on more accurately - but I know it's just a matter of time and exploration!