Project 1 -- Partners?

"Looks can fool you; even though they travel and fight together, neither would admit that the other is their partner. The male, brought up to be both a powerful sorcerer and a mighty warrior, summoned the demon girl to serve him. When he did, he put a necklace with a lock on it that keeps her power from growing too unstable for him to control, so he sees this as a master-slave relationship. The demon girl on the other hand, highly knowledgeable in the use of magic, promised the male that she'll kill him the second she figures out how to get the necklace off, so she constantly keeps her tail wrapped around his neck. The male thinks nothing of this, confident in the charm around the girl's neck. Besides, he's too preoccupied searching for an ancient relic said to contain untold power. He needs this so he can take down the oppressive dictator who rules cruelly over these lands."

This idea popped into my head while I was sketching random things for this project and I liked it, so I just went with it. This is actually my first time doing basically everything with a tablet (which I'm still getting used to) so it's not quite as clean as I'd like it to be, but it came out alright. However, I can definitely see spots that could look a lot better... been too long since my last big project, my drawing abilities lowered (ΘεΘ) (Now I get to obsess over this and spend tons of time practicing, yay~)

Alright, as for techniques I used. I started by making sketches of different poses/environments. Out of all of them, these simple poses and the cliff environment felt like they worked the best for me. After choosing those, I used the pen tool to make lines (it's the only thing I didn't use the brush tool/tablet for). After making the lines, I used the magic wand tool to make it easy to get base colours into their respective areas without going over another colour. Then I locked the transparencies and began adding shadow/highlights. For shadows I used a low opacity (about 30%) brush set to multiply for a few strokes. For highlights, I set the brush to a hard, small sized, high opacity (about 70~80%) and did a couple of light strokes.

I'm not really sure what else to put other than, if you want to be good (better than me, I'm not good yet, I'm okay) then practice till your hands bleed, then paint with the blood! (I'll bet that would make an interesting piece :P)