This was an image I created to initially use for my personal desktop. Since I love art/design & paintball, this was a very nice combination. The original drawing came from Ronn Stern Studios (http://www.ronnstern.com) who is a respected artist in the paintball community. I emailed him and asked for permission to post it in my portfolio section, with proper credit of course, and he agreed. He even asked if he could post it on his website, which is a great compliment. Ronn Stern's work is found throughout the popular paintball magazines and his work is comissioned for many of the large events.

Click here to view (http://www.deviantart.com/deviation.php?id=273145)

Comments welcomed...

Heheh, I commented on this already in Thinkdan, but maybe I will go into further detail here.

I like the bg nice effect, makes this 'warrior' seem surreal. the vivid red in the jacket acts as a strong visual anchor.

My only critique would be that the compostion seems a bit lacking for emptiness of the upper left area.

Cheers.

I think the background is a little too plain, but the color is very vibrant in the person and the technically the color is good, but the drawing is a little too rough for my tastes. It must have been difficult to color seeing as drawings that are digitally colored are often embellished by inking.

It looks like you used multiply/screen layer modes for shading, am I right (or burn maybe)? Ive always found that you can get the best results if you use normal modes and choose the colors yourself, that way you have complete control. Multiply will make your shadows warmer and more saturated in color. Shadows should always be cooler in color from the base, this happens in all light sources. If you have warmer shadows then the object will look artificial and kind of like colored celaphane, just like if you were to use burn then the object would look caramelized. Also using multiply with red, green and blue usually provides pretty bad results when shading something since they get super saturated and dont change much in value (its some kind of picky RGB thing).

I also have a tip for coloring pencilled art. Just place the pencil layer on multiply over all the color layers and lower its opacity so that the lines take on the color underneath them. If you do this then the drawing wont be so rough looking. But thats pretty much dependant on the style you are going for. Just make sure to put the lineart above everything else after you are all finished shading.

The background was meant to be bland because I did this for my desktop. Typically I hate extremely busy desktops as my icons get lost. I also used normal blending modes for the colors.

Thanks for the comments...

lol..maybe I should have read your first post most closely, now I see why you composed it this way. :)

Wow! I think this is the best work I have seen tonight. The lines and everything throughout the picture are outstanding. Makes the guy look very tense with the stress lines throughout the clothes.

I really like the little things here like the shading around the jaw and on the forehead. The position of the fingers and the way the arms are drawn are simply world class.

The color remind me of someone who is about to go dirt bike racing. Not really a critique just a comment.