Sarhazar #3 Step by step (Patreon)

This piece was a real nightmare, and I don't mean nightmares from Necronomicon but a art nightmare. I overprepared, overthinked, overdone this one. I felt in love in the lineart and was forever dissatisfied with rendering. I repainted shading 3 times, I had 8 different color variations, cropped and re-cropped over and over. Repainted Balthazar head few times it took me 3 weeks to finish it. 

1. Posed in DAZ and thrown in Blender. I was ambitious and I modeled the book, and few tentacles.

2. Lineart came out beautiful, with flats in I thought it's a masterpiece.

3. This is the final version of a shading. I decided to keep it quite low key and low contrast. Over rendering was destroying the shape design I created with flats.

4. And the nightmare with aaaallll the color variations....

5. I massaged the final rendering, polishing piece by piece, taking more reference photos, adding realistic rendering.... It's super polished, I don't do that type of finish too often....

On topic of overpreparation - here are some of my crazy composition ideas. The colored helper lines show all the repeating directional lines I tried follow. And my favorite spiral composition 😗👌