🂫 Leonardo "Jack of Spades" - Digital Painting & Process

We have had our first battle, Master Splinter. They were many, but we kicked... We fought well.

The ancient martial art of ninjitsu found an unlikely student in Leonardo. The Big Apple sewers were to become the stomping ground of a quartet of mutated turtles and in turn Leonardo would learn to channel his frustration of being caged in the New York underground to become an able leader and skilled fighter. Master Splinter's favorite student eventually discovered that his worst enemy were not the likes of the Shredder or Krang, but his own pride and stubbornness. Fortunately his brothers influence and good deep crust Pizza are known to have a calming effect on even the most dedicated students of the ancient arts of the ninja.

This is a digital illustration of about 48 bitmap layers. Using my mouse and standard Photoshop brushes and layer blend modes. The cards and textures I got from FusRoDa and edited them to suit our needs. I also tried to preserve as many of the steps as possible for the process animation. I then made the animation in Premiere Pro CC, simplified it, sped it up, added inserts, rendered it as an mp4 video file and then converted it to an animated gif online (nifty!)

Category	#FanArt
Medium	Photoshop
Suit	Spades
Character	Leonardo
Style	Digital Illustration
Original Artists	Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird
First Apperance	1984

Lore

Leonardo and his brothers were once ordinary turtles: when they were infants, they were adopted from a pet store by Hamato Yoshi. When their soon to be father walked passed a strange man, a Kraangdroid, he felt something odd about him and followed. Unfortunately, Yoshi gave away his position when he accidentally stepped on a brown rat's tail. The Kraang him and attempted to kill him, but Yoshi fought back hard. In the end, the Kraang dropped the canister of Mutagen they were holding, causing the turtles and Yoshi to mutate. Yoshi, having to have stepped on that rat, thus mutated into a humanoid brown rat by the name of "Splinter", while Leo and his brothers, after coming in contact with Splinter when he was human, mutated into humanoid turtles.

Splinter knew they would never be accepted in their urban society, so he took them to the sewers, made a home down there, and made the four turtles his children. Knowing the world would be dangerous and there would be a time where they want to explore the outside world, Splinter trained the boys in the art of Ninjitsu. Leo and his brothers were named after great Renaissance artists from a book Splinter fished out of the storm drain.

tmnt.wiki

Process

Here's the animated process for Leornardo that I made out of the individual layers. Since I didn't have my original sketches anymore I reverse engineered the beginning stages of the drawing. I'm also trying to make a unique transition at the end of each card. Hope you dig it.

Card number six and the second in the suit of spades. I'd also like to point you guys towards the drawing contest that I'm currently hosting where you can actually try the same exercise and create some cards of your own!

Check it out here:

✏ Sketch Off Contest - Edition 2: The Club of Antiheroes

Cowabunga,

ZeroOoC

Draw some more cards: