Mystic Gunslinger

So this weeks CHOW is "Mystic Gunslinger," basically a magical cowboy. I'm not going to be able to finish in time this week (forgot that Easter week = Church basically every night, ha ha), but I thought I'd throw up my sketch progress.

So during my lunch break earlier this week, I knocked out this 2-inch thumbnail:

My thought was to have Mr. Cowboy sliding down a slope, Clint Squint, lots of dust, and a glowy magic circle as the aiming reticle of his rifle. You can see that I noted that he should be a redhead, which started me off on a red-orange/cyan color scheme. Good start. But a problem has already surfaced: I clearly have no idea what someone aiming a rifle looks like.



Instead of redrawing the sketch by hand, I scanned the thumbnail at 1200 DPI so I could just use it as a base for developing the final drawing. Then it was time for a trip to the stock photography section of DeviantArt. Thanks to SenshiStock, I found exactly the reference I needed. Here's the re-drawn framework:

I changed the angle a little to make it more dynamic. You can see the original thumbnail at very low opacity underneath--I keep it in as a guide, but crank the opacity way down so it doesn't distract me from the new drawing. Otherwise I make the same mistakes as I did in the thumbnail.

Next it's time to put some flesh on these bones. I also added some detail to the rifle--if I do it now, I won't need to do it later. 

Time for clothing! You can see I reversed the direction of the duster from how it was in the thumbnail because, yeah, it should really be blowing behind him if he's sliding forward. I also sketched in the magic circle around the gun, though I'll probably do it in Illustrator for the final.

 

I'm going to need some reference for that hat, but that can come later. Finally, I roughed in the background to get those dust clouds working for my composition. 

Now I'm ready for the real work.