The Origins of a Thingamajig

I am so excited for the launch of Rayman Origins next month!  It's been very long since a good Rayman game was released, due to the Ravin' Rabbids franchise introducing a whole bunch of minigames.  Rayman origins goes back to the classic 2D side platforming style and it is completely hand-painted!  Everything looks gorgeous!  And it's multi-player (four players!!!)

Anyway, onto the artwork.  I've been working on this piece for three days now, and I just finished it an hour ago.  I wanted to capture the same style the game has, so that's what I based it all on.

I figured I might as well show my process work for this one again.

 Roughly sketched the whole thing out.

 One of the first pieces I digitally inked: it was a neat learning experience.

 Colouring the characters was fun to do: just stay within the lines.

 All of the characters done and coloured.  Onto the shading part.

 I found that shading without a smooth transition between colours gives a very nice, stylized effect.

 All the shading is done, while I'm still figuring out what to do with the rest of the image.

And WHAM!  There was a background!  Rayman's pupils were evil, haha!

For those of you interested (should be all of you!), here is a cool trailer of the game.

Rayman (Origins), Globox, Teensies and the Lums were created by Michel Ancel and belong to Ubisoft.