Jaimie Reyes is the (best) Blue Beetle, a DC Comics character with a partially parasitic alien scarab fused to his spine, that makes him an extremely powerful force to reckon with (he can take down half-Kryptonians with ease) and a dangerous sleeper agent for an alien invasion of Earth.
I made everything- including the background- myself. The whole thing took about four days, including character creation and texturing, creating a rig from scratch, and hand-painting the background.
Art Breakdown
Background
I painted a quick value test of the background first, using the tunnel composition. I painted the background in Affinity Photo, using gouache brushes.
Character rigging
As mentioned, I built the rig from scratch. It’s a fairly simple rig, with two notable additions: 1, I added bendy bones to the arms and spine for better twist, a method I learned from Dikko, and 2, I added pectoral deformers for a better chest and shoulder deformation. It’s not perfect- my weight painting could use some work on this area- but it definitely gives a better result than without.
Texturing
Base shaders
I used simple cel-shading + a “rim” light, using the Curvature node from GooEngine:
I used a Bump node and a Wave texture to add some inner lines to the legs and arms.
Custom Highlights with SDF nodes
To get the custom highlights, I used SDF nodes from GooEngine:
They're highly manipulatable and easily riggable:
Thruster flame
Character pre-rig/posing
Compositing and scene set up
I used a camera with very low focal length to get the foreshortening effect- 15 mm. For compositing, I added some film grain overlay and mixed a blurred version of the image into itself to get a diffuse glow (which really helps with the 2D animation look):
Thanks for looking 
