Character Design Challenge 1 - Final Painting

As this was the first of the design challenges I felt that I should do the first challenge to the end and do a final painting of the character.

The biggest challenge I found with this painting was making the character's suit look black..... without painting it black. This was weirdly the first time I have had that issue with work. Adding the hues of orange and purple from the background helped to tie the painting together while giving more depth to the image. This also worked to tie in the white markings on the character's suit.

Another challenge was getting the metal elements of the character's gear to look reflective. About half way through the painting I realised I was being far too reserved, jacked up the opacity on my brush and went for it, raising the light tones, making them contrast more sharply to the darks. 

When it came to the shield I incorporated the "Spawn" logo. The image seemed unbalanced with the glow from the spear and the large dark area on the right so the decidion was made to give the shield the glowing eyes also. I feel this helped to better balance the image. 

Overall the image was too dark, the diffuse lighting from the spear was punched up across the characters chest, head and the edge of the shield which helped to brighten it up. 

Ultimately while the image has a few issues I am fairly pleased with the outcome of the first challenge. The character's design speaks very much spawn and spartan, I feel that the original character is done justice and if used as a basis for a comic book character would not be difficult to reproduce for sequential images.
I have learned a lot from this piece as far as technique as well as about the way I work. I am too reserved and overly cautious when painting. Maybe coming from a more traditional background where if you really muck up, you really muck up. When painting in the future I must get out of this mind set and try to be more confident when working.