This is a quick run through making a CG when you have basically poor drawing painting skills.

I started with a piece of paper and a black thick pen, I sketched out what scene I wanted.

May waiting by the front door with her bag, waiting for you to hurry up and walk to school.

......gorgeous.....

Then I spend some time in a state of depression as I compare my drawing skills to that of professionals.....

Then I make a closeup sketch of what I think will be the most important part of the image.

The head / face / eyes ... usually the key focal point of any image containing characters

Now the Gremlin lives, so I do a lineart type tracing.

Oh no something went wrong..... I guess my rushed eyes make her look special......

Now comes importing the lineart image into photoshop and attempting to make something useable

Bascially I just erased the awful eyes and copied in some eyes I used on my other May sprites, then used the transform tool to add a perspective distort to them, then I add in basic color fills and I end up with this pretty quickly.

then the time consuming parts start, shadows and highlights..... I usually add extra layers for highlights and shadows and then blend them using the smear tool.

OK, so for me that's now an acceptable image to place ingame, has enough appeal and polish for me to not go insane anytme I see it appear onscreen. I've learnt that for now that perfectionsism is the enemy of just getting a game made, and there will always  be artists who are amazingly better than me, perhaps one day I can hire some of them to work on my games :)

Now I have to make the entire rest of the CG around this face graphic.

Basically I didn't keep a record of all the steps I've taken to make the rest fo the image, but most of the elements are google images with a oilpaint filter applied, and some of the house structure is just using the line tool, it's all pretty basic as I don't have much love for making BGs, I just want them to place the character in a scene.

So the final CG (my still have a few tweaks who really knows) should look like this, it also has some layered animation ingame with May blinking.

I jut thought this could be useful for those of use who really arent very good drawers painters etc. 

Thanks god for photoshop.