Let’s take a quick tour through the process of my recent commissioned piece “An Unexpected Friendship”. For the full video walkthrough, make sure you upgrade to the Patron Apprentice tier or above!
1. The sketch. For this project, I was given a fairly thorough brief on what was needed in terms of concept, presentation, and the specifics of the design. So my job was to find the best way to present that idea to highlight the main features of the painting—namely, the two characters of the dragon and the female warrior.
So for this sketch phase I put on my film director’s hat—drawing out subtly different poses and camera angles in Procreate to find the best variation of the concept. After consulting with the client, we went with option 1.
2. The underpainting. For this phase, I continued in Procreate on a larger document, painting in color variations over the value sketch.
During this phase, I wasn’t too concerned with the “local color” of the objects. Mostly, my goal was to come up with a strong lighting scheme that highlighted the most important elements properly. After some experimentation, I settled on a three-part light source:
– Bright, direct rim light from the upper right background
– Cool, ambient fill light from the sky
– Warm, strong reflected light from bottom left foreground
3. Blender rendering. For more details on this process, check out the full dragon head sculpting tutorial on this page below.
Basically, I wanted to create a really deliberate and realistic design for the dragon head since it was such an important focal element. Working in Blender allowed my to sculpt symmetrically and create realistic texture and lighting for the head.
4. Refined painting. After the Blender sculpt, I pasted the render into the painting and started building up the local colors and developing the character more, while further reinforcing the lighting scheme.
My main goal here was to eliminate any trace of the sketch, reinforce values, blend in the render with the rest of the painting, and start refining basic details.
5. Final detailing. This is when I shifted to Photoshop and started incorporating some photo textures. After the base photo layers were put down, I moved between blending them in and painting over them to achieve a harmonious affect.
During this phase, I also refined the key character details like the face and armor, and added in lighting and particle effects. I also refined edges where needed, create hard edges to draw focus, and soft edges to remove focus.
And…voila! The painting is complete.
That’s it for this post, but if you haven’t yet, make sure you upgrade and check out the full video tutorial here on my Patreon page.
Catch you all soon!
Cheers,
Eben