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I sat down and thought about it for a moment on what I want to do with this design. When I was thinking about that ocean, I started thinking about ancient gods who had powers over the ocean. One of them was Poseidon, the ancient Olympian God of the Ocean. I wanted to keep him in the similar style as my Chibi Hermes pictures (that's what I've been calling them to myself), since I would like to continue a series of drawings of Greek Gods an Goddesses. Here, I drew Poseidon riding his seahorse chariot through the cresting waves. Since antiquity, Poseidon has always been portrayed with a trident, a tool used for fishing. I made Poseidon's hair and beard long and wavy to mimic long waves. I hope to make Zeus and Hades in the future, who are also depicted with long hair and beards, but they will have different styles to tell them apart.
After creating the rough drawing, I taped a page of tracing paper over the image to make a cleaned-up rough for scanning into Adobe Illustrator. Here, Poseidon is more structured and without all those pesky rough lines.
On a new layer, I traced out the picture with the pen tool. Some of the lines that I make the first time seem a bit off at first. I'll be adjusting them accordingly as I add the flat colours in the next stage.
I did some more line refining with the direct selection tool to get out some bad curves and kinks in the line work. With that done, I added in the flat base colours to the picture. These will eventually change when I get to making the highlights and shading on the next layer but this is a working process so eventually, things change throughout production. I want to create this picture with colours of the ocean and sea life to match with Poseidon's godly powers over the sea. I'll look up some different seahorse pictures to find a colour that'll go with them nicely and not mesh into the waves because of their similar colours.
On the new layer, I created the shading and highlights to the objects on the image. I changed the seahorses to an orange colouring so that they would make a good complimentary colour to the waves and help stand out more. Another change of colouring was to Poseidon's hair, which I made 5% darker to help the white highlights to show.
Finally, I used the layer below to create the background. I made a nice sky gradient in the background with a starburst pattern behind Poseidon, his godly glow shinning upon the cresting waves. All hail Poseidon, God of the Seas!
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