Promo Art for Steam, Part 2: The Girl

Time to continue on with the promo art! As I mentioned a few posts ago, we decided to go for a piece that features both in-game graphics and HD characters. Below you can see the thumbnail we chose, as well as some make-shift in game graphics and the game logo pasted on top of it: 

Once the overall layout has been established, I start sketching what the characters could look like and show it to the rest of the team for approval or criticism:

Since everyone gave me an OK to keep working on the characters in these poses, I jumped right into it, starting with the girl. The process here is pretty similar to how I make the regular portraits, only here I used a lot more reference photos for the poses and anatomy of the characters!

Step one is to start creating line art on top of the sketch:

Once the line art was finished, I showed it to the rest of the team for further comments:

Now, her hand might look like it's in a bit of a weird place. The reason is that once the image is done we're gonna add some kind of spell effect to it, so stay tuned for that!

Now, as soon as everyone was alright with where this was going, I started with the usual color blocking, filling in basic colors:

After that, shading:

More shading, and highlights:

Along the way, I thought her arm-thingy looked a bit weird, so I remade it when finishing up the other details:

Now, this character isn't done yet, I suspect she might be pretty far from being so. But before I keep rendering her, I'm gonna being work on the guy as well, so make sure they fit together.

In the meanwhile, here's the background from above with the WIP female added, giving you a better sense of what this image will look like in the end: