This caricature of Peter Falk was an exploration of how far you can push character exaggeration and still maintain a likeness. The design was created for a game that would have had a mature rating, so it was important to maintain a certain level of seriousness with his character even though the overall direction for the Character Design on the project was heavily stylized, bordering on cartoony.  This concept was a good example of when working both traditionally and digitally can bring a level of creativity to your work that it could be difficult to achieve with one method alone.  I started working with pencil to block out some of Mr. Falk’s more prominent features, going more photo-realistic than exaggerated. Once I was at a point where my sketch captured enough of his likeness, I scanned it in and started liquefying in Photoshop to try different combinations of exaggerated features.  After settling on the basic form, I blocked out the core values in greyscale, while throwing layers of texture on at regular intervals to maintain the gritty technique.  Color came in at the very end, primarily due to the limited range of saturation, and was accomplished with a few overlay layers painted with splatter brushes and smearing to help give the color depth.  Peter Falk doesn’t have hair like this, but my grandfather did – so I leveled up Mr. Falk’s hair a bit and paid a little Homage to the Colonel in the process.