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.