Tractor Bob - Finished

Happy belated Easter!

This Monday evening serves for my Sunday evening this week, since it is my last day off before starting up the school week again and Easter Sunday was way too busy to be posting anything.. I hope I'm not throwing anyone off with this drastic change. This week I've managed to finally finish Tractor Bob as you probably figured out from the title and all I can do now is to walk you through the progress 'till the end.. 

Here's the mind-jogger: 

From here onward I'm going to start on the background, add texture to the block of flat and all in all just pull everything together once again by decreasing the size of my Airbrush. At this point, I also like to pull out a special and very handy tool called the Blur tool, which I have noticed to help a great deal when working on backgrounds. 

Above I have dabbed about on the side of the block of flats to achieve a brick wall effect and then adding a layer and decrease the opacity by half - then, smooth out the dabs so that they blend together slightly while keeping the brick wall 'graininess'. I've also added a subtle twirly in the sky, just to bring about a surreal touch to the image to sort of bring it all together, I felt it was a bit boring up there being all white.. I don't want to darken the twirl anymore than it is now so that it doesn't draw too much attention.

 After being done with the background, I refocused on the body of the tractor, adding texture with some wear and tear all around. Oh, I also added two little tree branches behind the character's legs, just to sidestep the background a little. If you compare the body of the tractor to the image on the left and the image below, you can see the difference of texture on the body. 

I wanted to keep this 'painterly' look to my image instead of a realistic touch which is why I chose to execute the texture of the tractor body by long brush strokes. This was not a planned action, I just felt as though it worked well when I zoomed out and sure enough it worked well to my eyes and so I just left it there. It's almost an unfinished look, if you will. 

Now that my tractor body was just about finished, I just did the same with the upper half of the tractor - slowly pulling everything together until I felt it was detailed and finished enough to suit my needs. Below you can see the work done on the top, nothing extraordinary just little tweaks here and there.  

Well, what can I say now.. For the past few hours I've just been fiddling around here and there, adding little details where I felt they were needed until I felt everything was falling into place and I was ready to present my finished work. I have to admit, I'm not too happy with the background block of flats or - the background at all - but at the same time I've been struggling with it all day and I don't think it will get much better than that. Maybe my next block of flats will look better, who knows!

And to finally get to my finished piece of work....Drum roll please...

.... Aand voila! As a last reflection on Tractor Bob I'll have to say I think the grim look works well with the work, if I must choose something that I thought worked out. As I said earlier, the background would have needed more work but due to my impatient nature, I've decided to let it go... For now. Otherwise, you can make up your opinion about it, I'm just going to leave it at that. 

That's all for this week then, next week I hope to start something new once again, I haven't got the slightest clue of what it is yet but I'll be sure to come up with something.