Hello everybody : )
I’m sorry for the lack of entries these days. I’m busy with my school project right now. I have enough time to finish it, but you know I’m such a lazy ass XD
Today I’m going to show you the process of my original painting »Illyncia’s Honor» [You can see the final piece here]. This was an exercise for class. I had to make a cover for a book, and I decided to try with my original story, MONARCH. Hope you like this walkthrough : )
01 Rough Sketch. This is how the concept came to my mind. At this point the figure is very abstact and all is messy. Of course the sketch had lots of mistakes here and there, but I worked on this base. I feel embarrased to show you this crap Xd
02 Painting the face. I wanted to paint my character Illyncia as I imagined her. I Usually start with faces first, I can’t help myself XD
03 Painting some lines. I feel more comfortable with lines, so I made a new layer and started to draw over the sketch. Since this is a pinting, I just used them as guides [not as in my manga drawings, I mean]
04 Lines done. Once I got the lines I needed, I moved some elements here and there to fit the composition. As you cas see, I worked with this premade fringes [provided by my teacher Ramón XD]. This is a double page cover. The front must contains the important information, and the back is usually more homogeneous and plain, in order to write the summary of the book there.
05 Starting to add color. Before adding color, I selected Illyncia’s body and the doves with the wand tool and cut them into separate layers. That way I got the floor, Illyncia and the doves in three different layers. I feel safe when I work each part of the drawing separately, because I can move, rotate, edit, paint, etc… each thing wherever and however I want, without restrictions.
After that, I added new layers above each element [in COLOR mode]
06 Overpainting. When I’m happy with the colors I put, I make another layer above to paint directly with my brushes. I’m just focusing on her body at this time. I followed the lines I drew before, but I painted and changed things at the same time if needed.
07 Painting doves. One of the doves were between Illyncia’s hands, and I felt I needed to paint it. I was paintig her arms, but the empty space was getting me nervous XD. I searched for about 5 doves references on the internet. Here you can see the dove I used for this one. It was too small, so I changed some details when I painted it. I didn’t realized my dove had three wings then LOL
08 Doves Done. Doves took me about two days, while I working on Illyncia’s body and hair at the same time. Everything was painted except the floor.
09 The Floor. Despite of what you thing, the floor was pretty easy. First, I made another layer with a vanishing point to make the perspective of the tiling. I painted the lines and colour them in two different layers [one for black one for white].
10 Marble. Then I searched for some free textures to create the marble. In another document, I made the tile and I applied the texture. I copied the tile into my drawing, and I transformed [free transform, distortion] them separately to fit my coloured tiles. Once I got all the tiles, I played with the layer modes to create the efect I desired. After that, I painted vertical reflections in anoter layer. Some cracks added too.
11 Vanising point. In another layer I painter the shadow. Here you can see the guides I made to paint the floor.
12 Edits. I had the painting done, but it still needed some color corrections. I made some adjustment layers and played with curves and colors.
13 Finish. I fix some small details here, and I aplied a warm color layer above. Now the colors are more homogeneous and all the elements seems more connected.
Ireland 