WIP - Danny Fenton Studying...

God, this picture makes me want to punch my monitor! Ugh! I've spent almost three, four days on this monstrosity, at about four hours apiece, and I'm not even HALFWAY done! More than forty layers, and not even HALFWAY! This is the first major undertaking in any piece of art, original or fanart, I have ever attempted and the difficulty is driving me crazy!

Day 1: Spent first hour and a half inking Danny, thermos, cheap ghost and crappy table with books. Ten minutes went to fixing his right leg as it was too short in the original drawing. Five minutes to spit out the crappy background. No reference (not enough memory to support the many pics I needed for the reference for the Portal). Went on to create needed sets and layers for the base colors. Devoted remainder of time to filling in base colors for background, table, books and Danny's clothes before hands cramped and had to quit.

Day 2: Spent roughly twenty minutes scouring color samples and references for appropriate skin tone and eye color. Finally gave up and pulled the RGB numbers from a screenshot using another computer as Photoshop ate up all 128 megs of RAM I had. Filled in the ghost. Began work on making the ghost look ghostly. Took about five or six layers, and then I had to reorder them because the lousy thing didn't look right in the original order. Spent next hour and a half trying to figure out how to get a convincing beam of light to come out of the thermos and got the basic colors for it down before frustration won.

Day 3: continued work on the thermos beam, which had it's own separate set and layers from the actual thermos color layers and ordered far from the thermos set, so switching about was a pain. Then I had to reorganize the ghost AGAIN because the beam obscured it and i wanted it to look like it was caught in the beam. B****y little bugger. played with filters and blend modes and transparencies and styles and a buttload of controls I've never touched before until I got the beam to look decent. once saved, i had to crash because the idea of mentally throttling Danny Fenton was becoming way too appealing

Day 4: spent all of three hours getting lighting done from the beam in preparation for shading and highlights. Thanks to my crappy memory, it takes forever to get the smudging and blurring done. the sets are scattered in all parts of the original order just to get the proper effects and each set has several layers, duplicates yes, but each layer with differing blend modes, transparencies... yadda yadda, and I'm still not fully happy with it but it's getting there. decided to stop for now because a) i like the shine on Danny's hair from the light, and b) I want to ram him into the thermos now for still being in base colors when I just want this done already.

*weep*

Good Lord, why do I do these things to myself? At the rate I'm going, it'll probably be another three days at least before this thing is done.

I'm praying some of you are generous enough to give me a few tips on how to get through this project with my sanity mostly intact. Anything would be most appreciated ('cept harping on about Danny himself unless you can constructively let me know how to tweak him properly and he's supposed to look older, he's like, 18 in this pic so don't bother with that). Oh, and if the hair looks slightly familiar, it's because I was inspired by Soychu's simple sketches of Danny's hair in some of her art pieces. It was just what I needed to figure out how to style it without it looking messy or flat (2D). Shading will finish fleshing it out....

If I don't kill him first. *eye twitch*