Process

From sketch to final paint: the character art commission process, walked through

Hector G. · Design Vortex founderMay 25, 202612 min read

Every commission I take walks through the same nine stages, in the same order, and the order matters. People sometimes assume the painting starts when the brush touches the canvas. It doesn't. By the time I'm rendering skin texture, two-thirds of the real decisions are already made.

This is the general character art commission process, walked through. Not the timeline for any single piece, which can run twelve days to seven weeks depending on scope, but the shape of the work. If you've read the three-week walkthrough with Lyra, this is the wider lens. Every commission moves through some version of what's below, whether it's a single token or a party of six.

Stage 0, brief intake
Stage 1, three thumbnails
Stage 2, refining the composition
Stage 3, color block
Stage 4, render pass
Stage 5, first revision
Stage 6, polish and the eyes-last rule
Stage 7, second revision
Stage 8, delivery files
What each stage looks like to the client

Stage 0, brief intake before the brush moves

Nothing gets sketched until the brief is in front of me and I've read it twice. The first read is for the character. The second read is for the gaps, what the brief doesn't say. Is there a pose? A light source? A scene context? An age range? Most briefs answer two of those four cleanly, and I'd rather ask one round of questions on day one than guess and burn a thumbnail on something the client never wanted.

Imogen sent me a brief for a half-elf bard in early March. The character details were beautiful, six paragraphs on her patrons, her instrument, her exile from a coastal city. The brief said nothing about scene or lighting. I sent back two questions: indoor or outdoor, and is she mid-performance or in private? She wrote back twenty minutes later: private, after the show, sitting alone in a back room with one lamp on. That single answer reshaped every later stage. The commission brief guide covers what to send and what to skip.

For D&D players sending a Hero Forge screenshot, the gap read is different. I'm not asking what the character looks like, the screenshot answers that. I'm asking what the screenshot can't show, which is most of what gets lost between the 3D model and a painted portrait. Stage 0 ends when I have a one-line pitch I can repeat back to the client and they tell me yes, that's the character.

Stage 1, three thumbnails on a single sheet

Now the brush moves, but barely. I do three thumbnail compositions on one sheet, each maybe four inches tall, in graphite or rough digital lines. No color. No detail. Just silhouette, pose, and framing.

The three are never minor variations on each other. They're meaningfully different reads of the same character. For a melancholy paladin: one full-body standing in armor with the helm tucked under an arm, one tight three-quarter portrait catching the face only, and one wider shot showing him sitting on a stone bench with the helm on the ground beside him. Same character. Three different paintings.

A description always permits multiple paintings. The thumbnails are the moment we agree on which one we're making. Clients pick one, sometimes with a small change ("number two, but can the hand be lower?"). Sometimes they pick a hybrid, the pose of one with the framing of another, and I just sketch a fourth.

Stage 2, refining the chosen composition

Once a thumbnail is chosen, I refine it into a confirmed line drawing. Proportions get locked. Gear placement gets locked. The angle of the head, the weight of the body, where the hands go, all of it gets pinned down.

I share the refined sketch and ask one question: does this look like your character? Not "is the rendering good," there's no rendering yet, but "is this the right body, the right pose, the right face shape, the right gear?"

If anything is off, this is the cheap moment to fix it. Moving a hand at the line stage is a five-minute fix. Moving a hand after the render pass is an hour, sometimes two. Stage 2 exists almost entirely so that Stage 4 doesn't get expensive.

Stage 3, color block, the stage that surprises clients

This is where most of the surprise lives. I get a polite, slightly-confused email at the color block stage maybe one commission in three.

A color block looks like a watercolor study. Big flat shapes of color, no detail, eyes that aren't really eyes yet, hair that's just a value mass. It's the painting's mood made visible before the painting itself exists. Skin temperature, costume hue, background warmth, light direction, all of it gets decided here.

The color block is the bones. If the bones are wrong, no amount of polish will save it.

It looks unfinished because it is, deliberately. I'm not painting a portrait yet. I'm painting the conditions under which the portrait will be made. Get the bones right and rendering becomes a question of decoration. Get them wrong and you're rendering a beautiful corpse, a piece that looks polished but reads cold, or muddy, or off in a way nobody can quite name.

When clients see the color block and worry, I tell them what I just told you. Most write back with "oh, that makes sense" and we move on. A few use this stage to flag a color they don't like, which is exactly the right time to flag it. Saturated reds get raised and dialed down here all the time.

Stage 4, render pass from large shapes to small details

The render pass is the longest stage, often half the total time of the commission, and the most predictable. Once Stages 1 through 3 are right, rendering is craft, not invention.

I work from large shapes to small ones. Breaking that order is one of the most common mistakes I see in self-taught work. Here's the order I move in on every painting:

Large value structures. Where the shadow falls. Where the brightest highlight lands. The body's overall light pattern before any detail.
Major form modeling. The volume of the head, the torso, the way cloth wraps a shoulder.
Secondary surfaces. Armor sections, fabric folds, hair masses, weapon planes.
Material differentiation. Making leather read as leather, making metal read as metal. Different surfaces want different brush handling.
Edge work. Hard edges that crop the silhouette, soft edges where the form turns.
Small details. Stitching, rivets, gemstones, hair strands, scar lines.
The eyes. Last. Always. More on this in Stage 6.

The grimier genres demand the strongest discipline here. A piece can read powerful at the value-block stage and lose its weight the moment small details get added too early. Bones first, decoration after. The D&D 5e commission guide and horror commission guide cover what each genre wants from the render pass specifically.

Stage 5, first revision round

Every commission at Design Vortex includes two paint revisions. The first comes after I've taken the render pass roughly 80 percent of the way home. I send a high-resolution flat image with a short note: here is the painting, here is what I'm planning to push further, what do you want to change?

Good revision asks at this stage:

"Can the hair be slightly darker?"
"Can the holy symbol be more visible against the cloak?"
"Can her expression be a touch softer?"

The asks that signal we should have caught something earlier:

"Can she be standing instead of sitting?"
"Can his armor be plate instead of leather?"
"Can the framing be wider?"

If those second-tier asks come up at Stage 5, something failed at Stage 1 or Stage 2 and I take responsibility for that. The revision system isn't built to redo the painting. It's built to refine the painting that's already been agreed.

A useful filter: ask for things that change paint, not things that change geometry. Color, expression, hair, lighting, edge softness, all paint. Pose, framing, age, body type, all geometry, and all things that should have been settled by Stage 2.

Stage 6, polish and the eyes-last rule

After the first revision, I finish the painting. Polish is where small details get refined to a believable level, and where the eyes finally get painted properly.

I leave the eyes for last on every commission. They're the single most load-bearing element of a portrait, carrying the personality, the mood, the moment. If I paint them early, I end up painting the rest of the piece around an eye-read I committed to before I knew the painting. By Stage 6, I know what the piece is doing, and I can paint eyes that serve it. A melancholy paladin gets tired, slightly-downcast eyes catching a single warm highlight. A scheming warlock gets sharp, slightly-asymmetric eyes with a cooler reflection. Same technique, very different reads.

I keep an eye reference image on a second monitor at this stage. Real human anatomy. Even for a tiefling or a drow, the underlying structure is human-derived, and skipping that reference is how portraits end up with the doll-face problem.

Stage 7, second revision when it matters

Roughly 40 percent of clients use the second revision. Most pieces don't need it. But when the second one matters, it really matters.

Tomasz commissioned a portrait of his wood elf druid in late autumn. First revision: small fixes, a slightly lighter eye color, a touch more warmth in the background. Second revision, two days after the polish pass: "Can the staff in his hand be a different staff? I just remembered my session-zero notes said it was carved from his grandmother's apple tree, not oak." Twenty minutes of paint. Different painting. Tomasz still emails me about that staff.

The second revision is held precisely for moments like that. It's not a backup in case I do bad work. It's a backup in case the client remembers something a few days after seeing the painting that they couldn't have known to say earlier.

Stage 8, delivery files

Final delivery is a folder, not a single file. Every commission ships with:

A high-resolution painting at 300 DPI, sized for print up to about 16 inches on the long edge
A web-resolution version at 2000 pixels long edge, color-profiled for screens
A print-ready version with a small bleed and a CMYK profile if print files were ordered
A square crop for social media and Discord avatars
If a token was part of the order, a 280-pixel circular crop with a matched ring color

Clients also get a short style sheet: the palette I used, the lighting diagram, and a note on how to describe the character to me if they ever want a companion piece. That sheet has produced more repeat commissions than anything else I do at handoff.

What each stage looks like to the client

A small reference for clients trying to read what they're seeing in their inbox.

Stage 0: a phone or email conversation, no images yet
Stage 1: a single sheet with three rough sketches, graphite or quick digital lines
Stage 2: one clean refined line drawing of the chosen composition
Stage 3: a flat, watercolor-looking color image with no real detail
Stage 4: progress shots moving from "value study" to "almost-finished portrait" across several days
Stage 5: a high-resolution flat image with a request for changes
Stage 6: a near-final image with eyes that suddenly carry the whole piece
Stage 7: the polished file with any last paint moved
Stage 8: a folder with multiple files, plus a small handoff sheet

If what you're seeing at any stage doesn't match the description, raise it. Sometimes I send the wrong file. Sometimes I'm experimenting and forget to explain it. Either way, ask.

What gets lost when stages get skipped

Self-taught painters skip stages all the time. Studios under deadline pressure do too. Each skip costs something specific.

Skip Stage 0 and I'm painting from my imagination of your character, not yours. The piece will be technically fine and emotionally wrong. Skip Stage 1 and we commit to a composition we never compared against alternatives. Skip Stage 3, painting straight into details from a line drawing, and you get the muddy-rendering problem, where every brushstroke is competent but the painting as a whole feels off. Skip Stage 6's eyes-last rule and the portrait ends up with eyes that don't belong in the same painting as the rest of the face.

The stages aren't a marketing exercise. Each one solves a problem the next stage can't. The order is the work.

Closing, when you're ready

If a character has been quietly waiting in the back of your head, the order form is the most efficient way to get a brief in front of me. The portfolio has examples from every stage above. For more on what a character commission includes, or whether you want a portrait or a token for the use you have in mind, those pages go deeper.

A few cross-reads: what a commission costs, how to choose between painterly, anime, lineart, and semi-realistic before Stage 0, and the studio's process page for the official version with screenshots. For genre-specific notes, the D&D 5e guide and the horror commission guide cover the variations that come up most.

The sooner the one-line pitch lands in my inbox, the sooner Stage 0 starts.