Don't die @sparksofdawn !
University... (Architecture is all-consuming ). Thanks for reminding me how much time has passed since the last update, the days are but a blur lately.
I'm still working on it, I hope to upload another wip (close to finished illustration) tonight or tomorrow night (I'd rather bet on tomorrow though :D)
Time for another (long overdue) update!
That might be the final illustration. It got blurrier!
I'm gonna work on the concept sheet now and come back to the illustration afterwards to check for mistakes and fix whatever I don't like (looking at you, sword handle area!).
In the meantime - thanks for the support @innocent and @rgdraw , I think I'll finish it in a couple of days (it might be a Christmas miracle :D)!
One thing led to another and I did not work on the concept sheet:
Fixed the tones to be more cohesive and overpainted some of the smoke and a lot of the lower background, because I felt the image started getting disjointed in values. Also thightened the weapon and hands a bit more and added some more flares of color here and there.
looking great dude I'd reccomend clarify the silhouette a bit though, the arms are getting a bit lost at the moment. It's probably easiest to just do this with lasso, and take the opportunity to intoduce some varying levels of detail on the character, having alot of sutff being hidden by the mist, leaving only it's silhouette, sorta like this:
giving your character some nice clean sharp edges will help alot in making them stand out from the softer swirling background too

@barrysaraiva17 Thanks, man! It was pretty fun to try to balance the details and not have them detract from the focus on the character
@engineered Glad to hear that, I've always been a fan of 'arcane'-ish sci-fi!
@tck Thank you, means a lot I'm often a bit scared to not overdo the atmospheric depth and end up with too little of it
The visual ref is much appreciated, things shall be tried!
One atmospheric perspective increase later that will not be too noticable without putting them side by side (I'll play around with it more but this version is a possibility):
Aside from redoing the knives (man, I did not like them before XD), I added some subsurface scattering to her coat between her legs - I kinda like it, but opinions are welcome.
Some Concept Sheet work-in-progress:
The pauldron and back-view are pretty much placeholders for now.
I'm not sure whether to have the sword ortho views or a side-view of her torso and head (the sword is pretty visible in the front view anyway), but I suppose it'll come down to mostly how much time I have left to work on it.
Happy Holidays, everybody! ^^
Possible final update time and almost made it for Christmas
I worked on something else a couple of days ago and when I came back to the illustration here, I realised I don't quite like some things... So after adding some more elements to the pauldron and arm, warping parts around, so on and so forth - here's finally a possible final submission (not like I'm not gonna decide to change a hue or something in a couple of days, but it's the thought that counts, right :D)
Concept sheet:
Illustration:
Fresh! This looks edible too
Few tricks for your image,
value check: On top of your artwork, put a black layer in saturation mode (it's non detructive like a hue-saturation layer)
Colour check: Add a curve layer, double click on it, select the middle eyedropper on the left of the curve (the one saying "sample in image to set gray point"), click the grayest area of your drawing. Enjoy the magic.
Cheers and happy new year!