Cloud Strife - Advent Children

I discovered this fantasic line art [link] in a random search here on DA, it turned up in the gallery of talon705. After looking at it for a while I came up with possibilities for colours and thought it best to ask the artist to colour this, which talon agreed to allow me to do.

Also I wanna give a shout out to my usual collaboration partner Natephoenix as he was teaching me some new tricks on out last combined gig (found here: [link] ) which I only got the chance to use to finish up stuff I already established. In this case I was able to actually use these new lessons from the beginning of this picture, which I am very proud of. Plenty of gradiants on the shading, lights and the hair. The hair in fact had no base colour so I just gradiant tooled it bit by bit until I got this wonderful shimmering "super sayia-jin" look (as my wife and I now agree to call it). Also a quick run on the tutourial pages and I find a carpet effect which I played with to make Clouds tunic appear woolen like in the movie that this piture was based.

All in all I am very pleased with the results, I did originally think to add some lowlights to clouds hair but thought in the end that would remove from the impact of his appearance. I was also sparce in shading his face as I purposley didn't pick a single source of light to work on this picture with, therefore giving it a "high noon" look where the light catches in most places.

So again thanks to talon705 for allowing me the pleasure to colour this picture, be sure to check out the artists gallery here: [link]