Assassin - Anwun - Part 1

• Software: GIMP (or Photoshop)
• Level: Advanced
• Subject: Anwun (Assassin woman)

After I did the painting, Slice for Demon Trio project, I gained a bit of confidence in terms of depicting human anatomy. Hence, I decided to undertake another project, titled Women of the Assassin Order. The background for this can be related to the Armem Enlom character from the Chaos And Order universe.

So for the first of this series, the character would be a lady assassin of the Oro Order - an assassin guild. She has passed the rite of passage of the assassin order and has several successful jobs under her belt.

Concept

As not much has been fleshed out in terms of back story, there is quite a bit of freedom in terms of concept.

The first of the study skethces is very rough, and I pretty much explore the different versions of face. Since I am still practicing anatomy, I make sure that I use enough guides to keep everything in proportion.

After I am confident with the subject, I move on to give her a more dramatized pose.

After that, I make several copies of the pose - smaller ones for now, to brainstorm on her attire. Even though the character is a fantasy, which means there is no actual reference to go by, the attire still has to makes sense and seem plausible if not possible. Once the pose and rough details of her grab is decided, we can move on to creating a clean line art.

Lineart

Working on a computer makes it real easy to have several iterations, do major modifications quite easily. To get a clean lineart, just create a layer over all the rough sketches and draw on it.

Before drawing the line art, you could scale up the image to required dimensions. For this piece, working in GIMP, I created a new document, A4 @ 300 dpi, copied the rough sketch into it and scaled it up while maintaining the aspect ratio. You could even go up to 600 dpi to draw the line art if the lines you draw turns out to be shaky. Once you are done drawing the line art, scale it back to 300 dpi and that should give you clean lines. Since while drawing line art, the only color used would be black and white, GIMP seems to go easy on the memory and it shouldn’t slow down the computer much.

Stay tuned - use KalaaLog.com feeds. Next post in this series would have the coloring process.