Wacom through to the other side

(Because what the world needed most from me today was another Wacom pun...)

The new Bamboo Fun is (aptly) really fun to use. To get a feel for it, I made this:

I'll say it first: this is not a drawing, it's a trace. I started with a cool CC-licensed screenshot and imported it as a base layer in Photoshop, reducing the opacity to about 10% so I could faintly see it. Then I blocked in the shapes of the Pyro in a new layer above the screenshot with solid, flat colours.

I then removed the screenshot layer from the Photoshop image and, continuing to use the original image side-by-side as a reference, used lighten and darken brushes of various sizes to do all the shading, tidying up the colour outlines where I needed to.

It's not perfect -- the colours aren't right because I picked them by guesswork, and it's low-contrast compared to the source. And it's pretty sloppy if you look closely. But for a 90-minute sketch, I think I'm pretty satisfied.

I'd like to do one of these for all 9 TF2 classes, which means finding great screenshots of each one to work from. So if you've taken, or know of, an excellent in-game screenshot showing the perfect pose of a TF2 character (red or blue, doesn't matter), fling it over to me please!

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