18th Century femboy Breakdown

Alright, let's start this breakdown with the image that started this idea:

 I don't remember exactly where I stumbled with this image, but it was probably while researching for one of my previous period pics, like the Vampire Hunter or the Princess femboy:

  In the end I just felt like those clothes would make for a perfect fancy boy, and that's it started.

 My initial vision for this character was very simple, I pretty much only had that pose and clothes in mind, and this end up being a big problem that almost made give-up on him, as you can see by this image:

 His early sketches (left) where basically just a cute boy in fancy clothes, he lacked any sort of personality, and without a proper personality he couldn't be anything more than a pretty face!

 Things only started to flow once I decided what type of character he is, his backstory and attitude, and these decisions would dictate his poses, behavior and what sort of situation he would get himself into. Once I had built the character a little deeper, more ideas and scenes began to pop-up in my head, and things started flow a lot better.

 Having the core ideas in place, I had to start gathering more references for the period, and for that I've used mainly two movies as inspiration, Amadeus and Barry Lyndon, i got very different references from each movie, from Amadeus I got refs from the more fancy side of things, the rich people, nobles and rich architecture:

From Barry Lyndon, I got more of the "common folk" and the green spaces:

 When it comes to the actual scenes, they are just situations I felt would would fit the character well, except from the last scene, that was actually inspired by this painting by James Tissot:

 As you can see, the act in itself, and the characters emotions where changed a bit, but the overall idea of hidden intimacy and the setting are pretty much the same.

 As for the technical part of the process, it wasn't anything too different, just my usual style of drawing, tho I did have a small eureka moment that I want to share with you, lets take this scene here as a example:

 So, the first thing you do obviously is set in place you major shapes and perspective in a very simple way:

 Than you draw in more details like clothes, facial expressions, hair, etc:

 But, once you get to this part, it is time to start laying down you value composition and decide on your areas of most contrast, but, at this point, there's just too much stuff to decide! what value will you use for the hair? and for the skin? what about the metal bars? they will be darker or lighter than the man in the back? what about the far background? will it be darker or lighter than the man? there's so many decision to make that it can get really confusing, so the best way to proceed imo to start by taking the most important decisions first, and use these decisions to informe the rest of the less important decisions, let me show you what I mean.

I know that the most important part of this scene is the main characters face, that's where I want people to look first, so to make sure that people will look there first, I will use my 2 most contrasting values there in the area, I will make his hair very dark, and his skin very light, and this will create a lot of contrast and pull in the viewers eyes

Now that I have this contrast relation stablished, what should I do about the background? should I just leave it white? no, because in order to maintain a high level of contrast between his hair and face, I need to decrease the amount of light values in the picture, reserving the high contrast between black and white only for my most important area, his face

Finally, to push this contrast even further, I will add in a even lighter value, and use it only on his face, this way ensuring that the area of most contrast in the picture will be the area where I want people too look at first

By following this process and start your value decisions by the most important areas first, you make sure that all other decisions will be made in such a way as to reinforce and respect your first decisions, without breaking the hierarchy of importance on your scene.

And this is all that I got for this Breakdown my friend, hope you have found it useful, or at least interesting.

thank you for your support my friends! cheers ^^