Oblong Ogre

Oblong Ogre cartoon monster illustration

The “Oblong Ogre” is my most recent entry for the weekly Monster Monday monster art sketchblog.

This artwork was created entirely in Adobe Photoshop CS4 using a Wacom Intuos3 graphics tablet. As per my usual process, the rough sketch was worked up very loosely, then that Photoshop layer was flipped. A new refined sketch layer was then created where I worked up the sketch in more detail, using the two previous sketches as a guide for both the line work and for a symmetry guide.

Once the line art was finished, I added a flat color layer, with additional shading and highlight layers above. The shading layer is set to the Multiply blend mode, and the highlight layer set to Screen blend mode.

I have recently found that you can get pretty good results by just using the exact color you are shading or highlights and just using the appropriate shading/highlights layer. In the past I was selecting specific colors, but it seems the blend mode does the trick pretty nicely. I do find that I need to add multiple shading layers to get the proper darkness for some of the shadows though.