"Draw me like one of your Hegemony officers."
HAhahah.
You mention Caravaggio, but I think Rembrandt nailed the Starsector vibe - in a temporally implausible manner.
Especially with his self-portraits. I mean, he might have been a jolly good painter - but he didn't half look like he's spent a few too many shifts hauling volatiles without the necessary PPE.
For some reason I've had less exposure to the work of Rembrandt, but having a look .... yup, yes. Right on.
Huh, I've been painting things completely backwards haha (lineart -> color in the lines -> refine).
I'll have to try the opposite approach sometime, this was fairly informative. I'd actually really like to see a post on doing the Starsector interaction images sometime, as large scale paintings are definitely an area I definitely need to improve on.
I don't think it's wrong at all to start from highly constructed line-art -- it's just not what
I do.
Part of why I've developed the approach I have is from not wanting to feel like I have to be attached to any previous decision made. It's not that I don't want to commit: quite the opposite, I want to commit to everything as it happens! AND I want to feel like I am able to revisit any previous commitment if I feel it will serve the work to do so.
Another thing I do that will drive people insane is I flatten the entire painting periodically (though I retain backup layers usually, though never return to them). When I was art directing, I had one of my artists do this to try to help him stop being paralyzed by questioning himself - he'd sit there with four different variations on a rendering and not be able to decide which one he wanted to use. I told him, no! Flatten those layers and force yourself to deal with the results! If you don't like it, re-draw it!
My thinking is: if ever I'm unhappy with part of the painting, I should be able to simply redraw it because I'm an artist and I have the artistic ability to do it. There is no perfection, and if one small part of the image feeling "perfect" keeps me from completing the entire image, it's better to remove that "perfection" because the point of creating a work is to make the whole of the work good, not some small perfect piece of it good.
As for an interaction illustration, hmm, we'll see!