I take illustration and Visual design exercises every day. Moving up the level, I decided to take challenging design exercises. Do you want to know why?

Where there is a challenge there is new learning! In the brainstorming session, a lion from the show I recently watched came to my mind. There’s my concept: LION a 3D illustration of LION. (You cannot predict your influences!)

For most of the illustrations I did, I don’t have a proper workflow. Even If you ask me to explain how I did it at the end of the process, I can’t explain. Because even I didn’t know how I did it? Why did I do it?

Now, I think it is the right time to enlist my workflow. Here we go

First.

Thought, What I’m going to do?

The Concept

How to achieve it?

Dissect the figure and model them as separate parts so that I don’t have to rig!

Creating the face with proper topology. Clear topo will be helpful to make edits in future.

3D Modeling

Textures

Lighting

I used Three-point lighting. It gives a studio light look. I want the subject to look friendly and funny.

Camera

Lights did its job! Next camera!! I want to see the output as what I did on the sketch, so I chose the Orthographic view with a 135mm camera for a 2D look.

Here is an example of why I chose 135mm instead of 25mm.

Poses

My idea is to make it look like a toy. How am I going to give life to it? Even if I make good body language on the character, lighting and camera give a toy look, I wonder whether it will give life to it. So I came to the conclusion that working on facial expressions is the only way to achieve it.

Can you see how my LiON laughs and screams?

Finally, my Concept is born!

Still, I want to enhance it! I did it in Photoshop.