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Hey everyone! Over the past few months I've been working on and off on some different personal projects for fun, and this is one of 'em. I've really grown to love backgrounds, and wanted to draw some images that place a lot of focus there. I also wanted to draw something mildly dangerous! Combining those ideas, it seemed like a good solution to illustrate an imaginary heist inspired by the sculpture garden at the Louve.

Of course after I finished the image, it dawned on me that, with a few tweaks, this could easily be an illustration of a sweet biker-Catwoman and Batman, so here you go!
I've been looking at these so long, I don't really feel like I have much to say anymore. They feel a little too tight and more realistically colored than a lot of my other work, but it was fun playing with texture and trying something a little different.

I don't have it shown here, but the very first step of my process was finding lots of inspiration photos, which included these sculptures at the Louve. My sculptures aren't exactly the same, and I don't think they're all this big or next to each other, but it was really helpful to get the lighting right. The rest of my process is as follows:

First I lay out the general shapes, lighting, and tones/colors.

Then I created a rough idea of the wall moulding, and refined the figure a little more.

I added a rope to create more of a story & diagonal, and started playing with how texture could look on the statues and wall.

I turned off my starting texture layers and basically just went back in and cleaned/refined everything--thief, guard, statues, etc.

Then I turned some of the textures back on and changed/added more of them (on different parts of the image in different layer modes, like overlay, color burn, etc.)

I added some color & contrast adjusting layers on top, like 'curves'. I always waffle around at this stage. I could go nudging color sliders and opacity and layer modes around forever. A few more were added between this stage and the final image

When I was done it dawned on me that this fit pretty well into the Golden Spiral! Cool bonus!

If I were to do this again, or do more like this, I think I'd like to place even more emphasis on the surroundings, and get more action in there. Or maybe a crowd of people? I don't draw enough crowds. We'll see!