Here’s the initial pencil work, value study and color splash work for a new personal illustration. The idea started as an environment concept involving a skull cave entrance in a jungle, but I thought it would be fun to add some characters and a potential story. The pencils were done in three parts (hunter, scholar, and cave entrance/third guy) and scanned at high resolution.
With the pencil layer blending mode set to Multiply, I started laying in grayscale values. It took a while to achieve the look I wanted, and there were a few false starts with the temple architecture. I decided on a more organic Maya/Aztec style. It still needs plenty of refinement.
I added a color layer set to Overlay at 65% opacity to establish overall color tone. The whole thing is pretty close to what I want, so as soon as I finish some of the temple refinements I’ll merge the color and value layers, keeping the pencil art separate for now. I’ll of course have to add all sorts of jungle vegetation, leaves, snakes, etc.
