Composition: Balancing Four Characters - 'Gang Gang' Process & File

Hey everyone!

I went a little bit crazy this time in terms of complexity, that's a tendency I have to make things more and more challenging. I started doing one character illustration a few weeks ago and yesterday I just broke into four, I'll be at ten at the end of the year lol.

Concept

Anyways, my goal this time was not to draw four characters, is to portrait the most compeling pictures I could find, unfurtunately, this time, the one I liked had 4 dogs and a motorcycle, but the efford was worth it. Why using this approach of suggested stories in references?, all tough using simple random references of casual objects and animals work nice, choosing these sort of pictures with a little suggested story helps to bootstrap the process faster, stories are powerful and not always I can't come up with something nice to "say", so think on this like a step extra into portraying interesting ideas.

How do you find pictures like this in case you want to try? easy, just check for the casual viral picture that portrait an ordinary scene of life, memes are good for this but it does not need to be a dunk meme low quality, instead, anything that tells you a little story with everyday casual things, if its funny, better. So far I've only tried with animals, maybe I'll be exploring objects in the future.

Execution

This process of shaping with big brush size and then cleaning idea with line art its been more efficient to me lately, I hope I can keep creating at this rythm using this approach. Working with shapes helped me to create and adjust readibilty in the composition. Since I've needed to portrait four characters, three of them quite big and one small, the distribution of shapes should be organized in a way each character as its own little space, balanced in respect to the others. I wanted to slighly suggest the viewers attention towards the pomeranian character's, which I had the idea to asign like a boss role, just becase I think it would be funny to portrait the smal one like the leader. But now that I think about it the character in the middle as a most dominant pose, leaders tend to be stoic and under control imo, visually speaking. But never the less these are just nice little touches make the story a bit more deep. These little ideas tend to change as the piece evolves but having them during the process is a good indication of a "good idea".

Once sillouette shapes as been suggested with grey tones I proceed to define the information trought line art. In the video you will notice that before using references for the outfit of each character, I spend some good time creating a pose that resamble the "mood" of each dog on the original reference. If you analize the picture you will sense a sort of dominanse each doberman transmits, these dogs are often used as police and guard dogs, so if I would think in a characteristic a character inspired in this animal, it would be related to an stoic serious standing pose, very imposing. So if I don't get that by looking at the simple gesture of the body I should not continue towards costume details and costume shapes.

Luckily, after struggling a little bit I've found a pose for each that give me this "vibe", but you will notice how this keeps changing over the curse of the process. If you try a similar approach and find yourself stuck in getting the right pose, think in how this character will be standing or behave casually, and out of that come up with a simple idea, good enough as base for next steps but not "perfect" since this step my be constantly changing.

For the outfit I focused on searching for lether jackets and different forms and shapes, I tend to relate in the character energy to search for styles, the first character in the left side gave me a dark "rock" style, the pomeranean character a bit sport and bright, the character in the middle like a sobber madure vibe, someone a bit "old" but still comfortable sharing parts of its body, and the last one very fashion and elegant. When choosing to combine several characters be as creative as you can in their personality this will help you figure out outfit details.

Colors and values for characters outfits was no brainer in this time, I definetly was comfortable using the whole pallete white and black. I know I often suggest to make variations to make the outfit more interesting, but since the composition was full of informaiton already, I tought it would be fine to keep them as simple as the original reference. I did make some smal changes, like the pink in the white girl and some bluis tones in the black girls but this is cool as long as act as an extra companion of the main tones. In the dobermans as well there is a purple reflection in their furr as a consequence of lightiing, these small details in the reference are very useful when working in the iterations.

Last but not least shadows, light and details. I did a simple treatment of shadows picking a top right light, not very crazy, again, often when compositions are so busy is fine to keep things simple, the work as been almost done by the drawing and is fine to use the rest of the steps (colors, values, details) to bring value to the line art instead of distract.

Anyways, feel free to check the PSD file in search of any insight I might missing, this piece althought was complex I had fun (after I finish the drawing). Wait for more next week!

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