Rayman is Back!

So... I did more Rayman fan art, because once wasn't enough :P  This time the official Rayman Facebook page hosted a fan art challenge, so I was all over that!  I wanted to do another big painting featuring all of Rayman's buddies from Rayman 2: The Great Escape.  I grew up with that game, and it's probably still my favourite Rayman game, graphics aside.

Okay, putting so many characters in a single painting was easier said than done, and this actually took me many, many hours to finish.  I didn't even fully complete the painting by the deadline of the fan art challenge, but the painting was finished enough for me to submit it.  I continued working on it afterwards, however, and here is the final result:

I also have process work for those of you that like seeing that stuff (I do, haha!).

 Thumbnailing: always important!  Great for overall layout decisions.

 The rough sketch of the now properly sized canvas: lots of derpy looking chicken-scratch.  My main focus here was to get the rough character positions and the scale they needed to be compared to other characters in different positions.

 More refined character drawings before actually starting the painting to avoid problems later on.

 And so the colouring begins!  This is one of the few colour schemes I tried and ended up liking.

 Blocking in the main colours of the characters.  This was pretty difficult: characters needed to be darker in the foreground, while the characters further in the back needed to stay contrasting enough with the background they were in front of.  Did that make sense?

 All the characters are blocked in at this point (while the lums are fully finished already [I couldn't resist, haha!]).

 Blendiiing!!!  This took quite a while!  I also started adding in smaller details at this point (fun fun!)

 This is how far I got up until the deadline of the contest, so this was my submission.

Since I wasn't fully happy with it yet, I added in those last details and changed some of the things I had to end up rushing.

Rayman and associating characters were created by Michel Ancel and belong to Ubisoft.