I will try and make PKMN art to post. But until then, here's some recent stuff. I have some PKMN stuff in the works, at least.
RCSI: The Wild Hunt
Fan art for the webcomic
RCSI/Code Name: Hunter featuring one of my favorite European legends, The Wild Hunt. Unintentionally timed for the London Riots, where hopefully the looters are having their asses utterly handed to them by ladies with swords.
PROCESS FOR THIS IMAGE LINKED BELOW.
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PROCESS IMAGE:
http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/2349/processr.jpg
"Hope this is useful to somebody! It was such a ridiculous process of painting-over and moving-around that maybe it'd help others to see what's up. 6u9
1. I actually started with a thumbnail, then took it into Google Sketchup to pinpoint the perspective and forms. THEN took it back into PS and made the lineart and tilted the horizon, etc. See those parts here:
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/6056795/
2. Underpainting. Just showing how I tried to use a warm base tone to set the mood and force myself to think of color and stuff. Or something.
3. This looks like a large jump, but it's really just blocking in semi-transparent over the orange. I start to decide on a mostly monochromatic palette of neutrals so when I add in Ruby's orange/red hair and tail, she'll pop out. I also want to make sure that everything is rather dark so that the lightest color is dark in comparison with Ruby's pure white fur later. The dudes standing are a brush that I used to try and decide on scale.
4. I make the overall piece less cool and sketch in some BG elements.
5. I decide to switch Max to face the other way and begin to paint!
6. Trying to decide on placement... still painting some things...
7. Still figuring out placement! Argh! I also make the background cooler to counteract all the warm sludgey colors starting to happen.
8. REFINING. I moved the horseman down, cropped the piece in, moved Max forward so he's bigger, and so on.
9. Still refining... I add the overall texture to the piece on a separate layer and lock it, and paint ONLY under that from now on.
10. Refining and adding textures to the buildings, sidewalks, etc. I want there to be a lot of detail that just sort of fades back and reads as 'stuff' without painting it all in. Textures from DeviantArt.
11. FINISHED. I changed the colors so that it's a little more striking and varied without being too crazy. Pinks and blues help to bring out the stark white and blacks of the foreground (I hope?). I did this by making a new layer of the entire image, using Photoshop's AUTO TONE, liking it, and putting the transparency of that down to 50%. It's fun to see how the program handles a painting when you use the Photo-editing tools.
Throughout all this, I used the following techniques:
-Glazing & Masking (
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5347189/) for large color changing, value-changing, and so on. I would copy the entire image, paste it on a new layer, make it much higher contrast, then use a mask so that only select images showed the change. I also used this for sharpening and blurring certain parts of the image; somewhere in there I made two new layers of the ENTIRE image (I merge everything constantly so it's essentially one layer), blurred one out with 'Blur More' and Sharpened the other. Then I put a mask on the Sharpen layer and brought out only the foreground figures that I wanted there to be focus on.
-As I said, I constantly merge layers. When I do a major merge, I save it in a separate file so I will have the past layers in case I realize I've fucked up. So I have 6 PSD files of this painting. I don't name my layers for this reason, except in the setup stage when I'm significantly moving everything around in big chunks.
-I used a lot of different brushes in this, but I'm still learning how to use brushes to their best purposes.
-I was messy-- or, if you like, FEARLESS-- and even if everything was one layer but I had to move the horseman down slightly-- I'd just select him and copy him to a new layer, and do that, then paint over it.
Anyway, just revisiting my process and thought you'd be interested in hearing about it!
Characters Ruby & Max, and the comic Code Name: Hunter belong to:
http://www.codenamehunter.com/
