As part of the requirements of the Bali workshop, each student has to submit a 3-artwork portfolio and complete an assignment. While browsing my recent paintings, I realized that I've been doing too little original work. Reluctant to overload my portfolio with fanart, I decided to get to work on my original ideas.

I did a few quick compositional thumbnails and ran through some friends. One of the thumbnails that was a favourite amongst them was selected and brought to completion:

Entitled "Who Let the Dog Out?", I wanted this piece to be a display of my current style. I've been painting a lot of vibrant, over-saturated forests on Mekazoo and decided to bring some aspects of that aesthetics into this painting. I've also come to appreciate the more cartoony side of my work, and thus, wanted to keep this painting more quirky and fun.

This is the initial thumbnail I created. Notice the almost top-down perspective and the dinosaur foot shaped footprint.

A basic color scheme thrown onto the grayscale thumbnail using Multiply, Overlay and Color layer blending modes. Alot of people ask me where I get my colors from. I simply color pick from existing images on the web. It's a much faster process for me. For this image, I wanted an evening sunset color scheme.

Begun some detailing work. I didn't like the top-down perspective of the thumbnail and decided to move the camera downward slightly.

I was painting this while on a Hangout session with my friends. One of them pointed out that a dog footprint would be cuter than a dragon/dinosaur one. I agreed, and decided to change it.

I thought it didn't make sense to have one singular footprint on the ground, so I added a proper trail, leading outward from the cave behind. I also added a broken chain to add to the story. I named the dog after one of my co-worker's pet.

Detailing of the main character and his band of brothers.

I posted the image on the Level Up! Facebook group for critique and comments and they gave some really helpful feedback. The main thing I changed was removing the left rim light on the main character as it was creating an outline around him that made him feel like he was not part of the painting.

Final image with color corrections and light effects.

No surprises here, the dragon tamer is a dragon himself.

And with that, we've come to the end of the series. All 8 gym leaders are out (Click on it to save the image at a wallpaper-friendly resolution):

Who do you think deserves a spot? Which is the best pairing? Post 'em in the comment section!

I believe this is the first series of drawings I've actually managed to finish. I'll take a break from doing Dota2 fanart for a few months; I've already devoted a large portion of the previous year and a half on it. Moving forward, I'll be finishing a Dota2 set with a friend for a hero that's currently super popular in the metagame. I'll also be concentrating on more personal work in the upcoming months. In fact, I'm currently working on an assignment for the Bali workshop that I'm attending soon. The finished artwork will be up on the blog next week.

Bow down to your queen.