Illustration Friday - Storm

Keeping up with Illustration Fridays, one of the themes came up as 'Storm' and that got me back to my adorable Hermes again. It's his irresistible charm . . . I know it. But this also got me thinking about Hermes' backstory too, like it did with Wool. Hermes is the son of Zeus and one of the Greek Pleiades, Maia. Because if you know Greek mythology like I do, Zeus wasn't all that faithful to his wife Hera; because he was VERY promiscuous with other women. But when you think about it, Hermes must of had a lot of pressure on him with his daddy being Zeus, ruler of the Olympian Gods. In fact considering that he was responsible for a lot of children, you would think that he try to keep their acts together. Then again, he should try that tact on himself, too.

Thus, for the new theme of Storm, I thought that Hermes should be shown with something else . . . a storm cloud sent by his daddy to give him chase, punish him or just because he was annoyed with him for playing a prank. I doubt that poor Hermes will get away without getting his rear fried. Poor Hermes is not having the best of days.

With the rough done, I went on to tracing him over in pencil on tracing paper. Again, you will see a little snippet that the scanner caught of another drawing that I made on the same paper. Don't worry, it won't show up in the finished product.

Just like the last works, this picture will be polished up in Adobe Illustrator. The pen tool lines will be edited later to look more refined.

Another screenshot of the picture with base colours. The cloud here might cause me some grief to match it up with Hermes' colour scheme, but then again these are the base colours.

With the flat colouring done, I moved on to adding highlights and shading to the picture. I changed the cloud's colour a couple of times to get the right look down.

Lastly, I added in the background on a separate layer behind the other two layers for the characters. I tend to make another starburst for the spot where the lighting is hitting Hermes for more affect and made the background a dark navy blue gradient to show difference between the foreground and background elements. Unlike the other starburst effects that I used for other Hermes pictures, this one has less spikes, to kinda give off that feel of cartoony lightning. I removed the speed marks because I thought that they really didn't go well with the shock effect in the background. Run Hermes, Run!

NOTE: Please leave a comment after reading this article. I appreciate any and all feedback on my artwork and any helpful tips from viewers. Spamming and trolling is forbidden.