How did I do it? : The Rust Woman

I've be meaning to make a little behind the scenes post about how I created some of my projects, so I'm going to show off how I created my Rust Woman for my college class.

1) I got my assignment to create a mutant. Essentially, the definition was a human/something hybrid. It could be combination of a human animal, human plant, stuff like that.

My initial idea was a human/plant mix for a character I had in high school and early college. She was this generic rose character who wanted to take over the planet because she was crazed and had an unwarranted sense of entitlement. 

1st possible sketch I did of her when I was in my senior year of high school.

She was originally part an quirky ensemble who essentially trolls my hero characters at every turn.

my recent sketch idea

more ideas

I was told by my friends that a rose person was really generic. So I decided to take anther approach to the project. I wanted to make a mix of a human/mineral (like a rock person or something). I wrote this character story with some inspiration from one of Walter Moers books (Which I highly recommend reading). 

The story went like this:

What my crazy handwriting says: 

The Rust Woman

- Immortal Gaurdian of the 

Rust Forest, an underground mone that was formerly an Oxygen Purification factory, thus contain metal trees which have now rusted down, hence, The Rust Forest.

2) I got to brainstorming my ideas. This the part of the stage that I ask myself "This is a stupidly awesome idea! Fuck yeah!" I rarely look for reference at this stage (OMG! He doesn't use reference! DESTROY HIM!) despite the fact that I was in the middle of a library when I was doing this thinking. Personally, it messes up my flow of thinking and getting things down  and figuring out what I will need to research. Like an outline of sorts.

head ideas

I did do some research on rust textures and I found out that the majority of my work will be in figuring out how to render rust in pencil and look fairly convincing.

3) Now, I'm actually doing some research! (you cretins...) I Google searched for some rust textures like so:

I also research a style I wanted to go for. I had this classic monster movie poster in mind to kind of it that strange, hammy feel of fear.

Plus I enjoy the colors and I want to copy them.

4) I do some actual drawing.

First , I took a pose that I drew during my life drawing sessions...

 ...and modified it to be a tubby woman.

The initial sketch was done with blue pencil and the rendering was done with normal pencil. I usually use 3B or 4B pencils because they a hard enough to have a good line yet soft enough to "bend" my lines. Then i continued along for shading the piece still using a small selection of pencils. No more that three were used, a light H, an medium, 3B, and a dark 6B and go from there.

5) I work on the colors for my piece. I had some bumpy starts...

But I essentially stuck with some more experimentation

I used the my pencils for my texture

 and had them colored

Then for the shadows

And finally the deeper shadows and highlights!

I didn't need a back ground for the assignment, but I still wanted to imply that there was some kind of space in it.

My first attempt was horrid and you should hate me for trying it.

Bu,t I remembered my shadowing so I used a simple green fade out gradient.

6) So finally, I'm done and I believe I did well!