Characters in Silhouette

A client for whom I  had recently drawn a few characters in his game saw the intro image I did for the Night People article.
The image was a silhouette with a colored back ground. He asked me to do a scene of the Knight, his squire and a pack animal  traveling through a cold and wintery scene late in the evening.

For these images I generally do a pencil sketch on drawing paper, draw the outline in pen and ink- filling in the big areas with a sharpie marker. I scan the work into photoshop. As is usually needed, I can select individual areas and move the shapes around to position them better in the space. The pen on paper can be a bit hairy so I clean it up digitally in photoshop going back and forth between digital brush and eraser. I have digital brushes that do a pretty good job of looking like pen and ink.

Sir Fulke and Squire, pen and ink and digital.
Copyright © 2012, Columbia Games, Inc., Richard Luschek

I then create a layer under the line art and paint the color under it. All the color is done in photoshop. I drop in some textures and collected images to layer it up for a deeper look.