Jinx and Powder from Arcane
Jinx from Arcane League of Legends is pictured with her younger self, Powder. Jinx exudes the confidence that Powder is lacking. Powder has her monkey bomb with the hextech crystal while Jinx brandishes her grenade and shark canon. I wanted to practice setting up a color and light workflow.
Final Image
Initial Concept. Painted in Photoshop and Procreate.
Original Composition seemed boring, so I added Powder. The relationship between older Jinx and young Powder immediately seemed more interesting. I rendered the forms in the underpainting. Not quite ambient occlusion.
I started laying in the background colors to establish the mood. I put flat colors underneath the black and white layer and put the b/w layer on multiply.
I put layers set to Color and clipped them to the b/w layer to remove the gray tones to the skin and other areas.
I adjusted the color palette to resemble the color scheme in the Arcane movie. Roughly painted in the background to give context to the characters. I did some paint overs to add more details and fix some forms. Used
Added a shadow layer on multiply. I used a lavender gray color.
Added some key light on the floor.
To make the key light, I took the shadow layer, hit control to make it a mask, reversed it and filled it with a light yellow. I set the layer to Overlay.
Added a white rim light on the characters.
Added a blue reflected rim light.
Painted more shadows on multiply using a lavender color.
Used Overlay to paint a red shadow line/halftone on the characters.
Did an over all paintover to fix the forms.
Added curves and masked out areas to add more light.
Painted the cloud tattoos on Jinx.
Added light bloom layer using a color dodge layer with orange color.