Warrior Boy Breakdown

  There is actually two main inspirations behind this series, the first one is just my old love for the fantasy genre, in particular the works of Frank Frazetta:

  Drawing barbarians, warriors,  goblins and monsters is always fun, even when there's no NSFW content involved, but as you can see from the paintings above, Frazetta's works express a clear fascination for the human body, and in many of his paintings, the male body is also depicted with a certain grace and sensuality:

 Obviously, not all his male characters are painted in this style, and in general sensuality is something much more prominently on his female characters, but it is clear that there's a range for how he depict his male characters, and in general, the genre of fantasy has a obvious appreciation for the physicality and sensuality of the human body.

  The second inspiration is just my personal interest for the grey area that sits between masculinity and femininity. I just have a certain fascination for how masculine and feminine aesthetics can be mixed and match, how far can you push the male form into feminine aesthetics while still maintaining a clear masculine form? and vice-versa? can it be done without going into androgyny?

Artistically speaking, for someone as interested in the human forms as I am, it is just something I have to explore, and the theme of fantasy with it's focus on the human body is the perfect match for creativity and experimentations.

As for the art style, it is pretty simple, I start with a simple sketch setting up the important shapes and silhouettes:

 In the next step my focus is in the areas of contrast between my lightest and darkest tones, to make sure these areas will have the appropriate level of attention, I start with them first:

 After these areas of contrast are stablished, I just add in one final value that will reinforce this composition by reducing the contrast in the other areas that aren't the main focus:

 It can be hard to see the simplicity of the value configuration here with all those distracting colors, details and textures, but if we get rid of the colors:

and simplify the values to it's 3 major blocks:

 You can see that in general, the value composition is very simple, I just made sure that my most contrasting values (black and white) only meet in the areas of most importance (his face and body), meanwhile, the other areas of less importance always have the middle gray serving to reduce the contrast.

 Using a simple value composition like this let me focus on the other aspects of the illustration that I consider more important for the project, like the characters forms, proportions and expressions.

And that's pretty much it, hope this breakdown was an interesting read.

thanks a lot for your support and patience my friends ^^

Cheers!