Han's Shot First

So a few weeks ago I posted a Demotivational poster of R5-D4 that I painted. I decided that I wanted to print it up for my desk at school next semester. That got me thinking that I want to start making and selling Geeky prints. I was recently on the site imgur where I saw this picture of Harrison Ford pouring shots. Suddenly I found myself thinking of the age old debate of who shot first, Han or Greedo, and thus this latest piece was born.

This time I decided to set out to try something different. I wanted to an entire painting without any linework whatsoever. I have done that before with landscape and environments (see my first blog post here for an example) but I have never done that with characters. The first step was finding the right reference photos. Obviously I found plenty of pictures of Han, Greedo, and the Cantina, but I also looked up photos of people drinking shots. I myself don't drink alcohol, so I knew that relying on my memory for this pose wouldn't work out. After finding the right pose I began to sketch out the piece and got this:

Now that I had my sketch done I began to fill in the base colors of each part of the piece so I could get an idea of my palette.

Once I was happy with how this turned out, I began to add value. After getting some great tips from my friends J.P. Perez and Amanda Bell, who are both FANTASTIC artists who regularly sell their work at cons, I finally felt that I was happy with the piece. 

All that was left was some minor color correction to better fit the atmosphere of the piece and voilà!

I'm pretty happy with  this piece, and I plan on making prints available of this, and the Bad Motivator on very soon!

As always thanks for reading and enjoy!

~Josh