Marco and Eva - Commission & Process (Patreon)

I was very excited about this commission, because it's my first commission featuring canon Animorphs characters! it also features two of my favorites: Marco, one of the main 6 protagonists, and his badass mom, Eva. 

This is a scene that could have taken place near the end of the series, with the alien war reaching its climax and everyone dealing with a lot of feelings on top of having to live in the woods. The commissioner asked for Eva sitting up watching Marco sleep after a mission, thinking about how even if she can't protect him from the things he's facing, she can still be there for him as his mom.

I started off with a sketch, and laid out some reference images -- including a previous drawing I'd done of Eva, and some bad selfies of my own hands. I find that I always get more unique hand poses from photos, especially taking said photos myself, than if I try to imagine hand poses from scratch. (Smooth Criminal is the name of the brush I used for inking-- I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget which one I was using if I worked on a different picture and then came back.)

inks, straightforward stuff-- filling in details, adjusting the composition a little more:

then I laid down colors with the round default brush set to pressure-variable opacity for the background, trying to get a soft, painted look. The commissioner requested monochrome coloring, so I went with blue to give the scene a nighttime feel.

then I colored in the characters and Marco's little sleeping pad, trying to incorporate enough contrast to help the foreground stand out against the more uniform background:

and then the last step was adding the blue gradient to the top of the picture that can be seen in the final version! I wanted to use a dark gradient to help draw the eye down to the lighter-colored characters, and to make the tree foliage seem denser and shadier.

Oh and then I also did a little sketch of a revised human morph for Tefnoor, one of my Andalite OCs, because I have to stay on my bullshit: