Cartoon cyclops - color sketch

This sketch of a cartoon cyclops character is my first entry for Monster Monday. Sketched out and colored in entirely in Photoshop using a Wacom Intuos3 graphics tablet.

I started out rough with the body, just doodling around to see where things led. Once I had the general idea for the body, I created a new layer and started working on ideas for the head. Initially he started out as a devil/demon, but I wasn’t liking where it was going.

New layer created, started sketching rough for new ideas, got the general shape of the head that was finally working well with the body. From there, the cyclops theme just kind of presented itself.

I took all my sketch layers, grouped them into a new payer and reduced the opacity of the Layer Group to about 10%. Created a new layer for the black line art, then another new layer underneath for the color. Once the flat color was in place, I duplicated that layer and used the dodge & burn tools to add shading and highlights.

A simple background was added, then I went back and darkened up the lines and cleaned things up a bit. I wanted to keep it kind of rough and sketchy, so I didn’t go overboard on the cleanup.