A while back I took a terrifyingly informative Digital Painting course with the intimidatingly talented young Bobby Chiu at Schoolism.com. I learned all sorts of tools and tricks that made Photoshop seem much more powerful than it already did. Are you sensing my fear yet? haha.. I was eager to try out some of the techniques I learned from Bobby on a drawing of my own, but that ended up taking quite a lot longer than expected!
This little 'Mouse Pilot' is a modest beginning but hopefully I'll do many more now that I've gotten the ball rolling.
Here's a bit of the back story: My first line of attack is gathering reference. I always gather way more reference than I probably need, but it's enjoyable for me and I really find it useful. For this one I needed ceilings and fans, pilots and paper airplanes, and mice - lots and lots of mice. I especially wanted to try showing a bit of subsurface scattering on the ears. I chose a hybrid of cartoony and realistic posing and rendering. I experimented with keeping the left ear turned away as it should be and decided it looked funnier this way, even though it's technically incorrect. I started this in Brushes on my iPhone, moved the PSD to Sketchbook Pro on my PC to use the lovely drawing tools, then switched to Photoshop to paint it.