Gentleman smoking a pipe

[8bitbeard]

I am currently working on a gentleman from around 1900. The goal is to animate him so he is smoking his pipe while talking to the audience.

He is a very wealthy and experienced explorer that has traveled to many places and seen many things.
He is actually a part of a larger picture, which I paused working on for a while. Now I'm back, but I want to solely focus on the character for now.

I'm still completely unsettled on the details such as what he is actually wearing (leaing towards some kind of expensive morning mantle), his actual face and hairstyle (most likely he'll get older with greyish hair) or how the chair looks like.

Some references:
Mr. Connery smoking
Mr. Connery smoking some more
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[8bitbeard]

update

[Pizza Tom]

I like where this is going! I think you captured the "adventurer yarn" feel already. Something seems slightly off about his legs though-- I think you should bring his closest thigh up a pixel or two, from this angle it looks like his butt would be intersecting the side of the chair.

You could also probably push your contrast more, especially on the red. I actually didn't even realize there was a darker shade until I blew it up 3x.

[8bitbeard]

thanks!
I've moved the legs up a bit and it actually works better now. It's really hard for me the get the perspective right on the legs, but I'll get there.

I've also played around with some variations of the face proportions:

[Helm]

The knee of the back leg should be infront of the front leg, no? The fore leg is resting on top of it, isn't it?

[8bitbeard]

Yeah I don't know. The perspective of the pose is hard.
I tried putting the knee in the foreground and adding some light to it, but it seems really wrong.

[Grimsane]

i think it might be a subtle anatomical oversight, the way you've depicted where the hips and buttocks would be means his left leg is being twisted outward, or his right leg is a tad longer than it ideally would be, when people cross their legs, unless they twist the under leg inward toward the other, they can not hook their over leg on their opposing leg, some people aren't even flexible enough to tilt their legs inward enough to do so, but here is a picture of the source inspiration to illustrate it somewhat. and here is an extreme yet entirely un-edited example of the twisting needed to pass legs further up than the knee (looks quite unnatural)
and here is a quick edit with some suggestions on how to improve without too much effort: