Scanned in sidekick

Scanned the finished sketch into Photoshop and set up the channels to make it into a line art piece, making it easier for me to colour in and make variations. I really enjoyed this process and didnt take me long at all, im very pleased with the outcome and has boosted my confidence a bit about the whole project.

This is the line art, simply made a new layer and draw over the sketch to get a crisper and thicker line. Then iI made a channal layer so I could colour in and not lose the lines, also I edited areas to make the proportions more realistic such as making the back legs thicker and the head larger.

I started adding colour but there are areas I still need to fine tune such as the mouth, paws and claws

This is the finished product, as you can see the paws are alot neater and the mouth is alot more anatomically correct. I changed the colour or the eyes to get a more wolf like feel

Sidekick

So I thought it was about time I started one of my other character designs just to make a start on them. I started a sketch on paper of the wolf I wanted as the sidekick first looking up referances of structure facial features etc. I drew the face first and after I was happy with that I found a stance that I liked from reference and drew that in, the whole process from start to finish took me about 35-40 minutes (I havnt drawn traditionally in a while) I was happy with the outcome but new I was going to scan it into photoshop later so I wasnt to fussed over much detail.

First front face sketch

Not a very good picture but heres the finished

OMG IM STUPID!

Im actually really doubting my intellect as of late, the pen and tablet that I have had for nearly five years has basically been working as a glorified mouse! I was working away on my character when my teacher noticed something, he said have I got the pen pressure on? and I said yes because the icon is selected in photoshop saying so..... not the case.... the whole time I have had the tablet I never installed the driver that came with it because I thought it worked just fine because you just plug it in and away you go..... *face palm*..... so the basic tools like pressure and opacity hadnt been working at all and thats why I been faced with some difficulty with my work because I was individually sieving through EVERY colour tone to get shadows and highlights and having to manually change my brush sizes when I could just have utilised the pen pressure ability. Oh dear jess..... So with the help and patience of my teacher (who wasnt even teaching me at the time he just noticed it walking past me) downloaded and installed the correct driver from the website. Now the graphics tablet is an entirely new experience for me to work with in short its bloody brilliant! cant believe how difficult I had been making it for myself over these years! You can see the difference below, this only took me like half an hour!