Caricature Step 03 - Texture

Hi All!

Here is step three of my Caricature -  the texture.

At this stage I have begun adding some different skin tones, using a soft, textured brush at a very low opacity (around 15%) to slowly blend the colours of his face.
I have used various shades of the flesh base tone to start with, keeping reasonably close to the original colour laid down in the flats stage, but moving up and down the scale to lighten and darken areas.

The eye sockets, inner ears, lips and creases and folds of skin have had a slight blue added, the chin and bony area a slight yellow, and the nose and ears (fleshy parts) a slight pinky/red.
This is a technique I have found is used in many forms of art, including traditional painting, airbrush and texture modelling in 3D.
If done lightly as a base before adding the main flesh colours it can add a slight level of realism to the finished piece. The blue enhances the colder area of the face where less blood flows, the yellow (used extremely sparingly) can help promote harder more bony areas, and the pink or red of course highlight the fleshy areas with more fat and blood flow.
Of course at the moment he looks like he's freezing cold a little ill, but once blended further he'll look a little healthier again!

Blemishes have been added using various different types of brush strokes (dabbing, sweeping etc)  to start to get rid of the plain smooth gradients as unless you have a trowel load of make-up on nobody has perfectly smooth skin!
I will yet add in some freckles and moles to help make him more interesting to look at.

Although I have begun to add in lighter and darker areas I won't call this the shade and light stage, as I am still using colour, and in that stage I will be using the brightness settings in conjunction with the history brush to control the lighting and shadows.

Caricature Step 02 - Flats

This is the second step, the flats. (also, this didn't take me the 5 hours gap since I last posted, I went out! lol)

It's not much of an update for this image (it would look more impressive on a more detailed picture!) but it's an important step when colouring, as on a more detailed picture you can start to set the tone of the image.

Here's a brief idea of what's going on in Photoshop at this point, and why.

I have quite a few different layers in Photoshop set up, some people try to keep it to the least amount as possible, and although I often do too sometimes having several can be very useful, as it will give you greater control later on.
Naming them and keeping them in the right order is very important so you can keep track of what's going on.

From the top I have a layer named Hair, this is empty at the moment but will later contain.....Hair! This is at the top as the hair will need to be above the inks layer if it's any colour other than the colour of the inks, which is black.
Below is the Inks layer, usually with a scanned sketch this would be set to "Multiply" so that only the dark lines are visible, but as I have the inks with a transparent background this isn't needed and is left set at "Normal".
Below this is the Skin layer, which contains the skin colours, under both the Hair and Inks so it won't effect either of them when painting.
Below these are the Mouth, Eyes and Bow tie layers, in that order, all of these are below the Skin layer above for the same reason as the Skin being below the inks and Hair, if I want to paint just the teeth, or just the eyes, I won't have to worry about the brush going onto the flesh colour of his face and ruining it.
Below all of these is the background layer, which in this instance I will leave and worry about closer to the end of the painting.

At the moment it's also worth noting that the Skin, Mouth, Eyes and Bow Tie layers all have the transparency box locked, this means I can freely paint on each layer knowing that I'm safe and can't paint anywhere that isn't already painted on that layer.
So if I'm painting around his eyelids I won't have to worry about going over onto his eye itself, and the same thing of doing the lips and not going onto the teeth and gums.
Handy!

The next update will be a little more interesting image wise as I should have a lot of the actual painting of the skin texture done, as that's the third step....Texture!

Caricature Step 01 - Inks

Hi All!

I'm going to do another step by step painting, this time a caricature doodle, that I liked and thought might be good to develop into something finished.
No real plan, just doodled a few faces, liked this one the most so went with it!
I won't post the initial sketch as it's pretty much just a rough version of the inked one, with pretty much no changes made whilst inking, apart from repositioning his teeth a little (they just didn't look quite right in the sketch).

I'll try and do the updates in around 5 or 6 steps, with a little narration on what's been done on each step, and some thoughts on why I chose to do what I have done at that stage. All this should be hopefully done over the course of two days, and completed in time for Fan Art Friday! (Hopefully)

The 6 main steps are (for me anyway) -

                                    Sketch                  (Draw what comes to mind and pick what to develop)
                                    Ink                        (Pretty simple, ink over the scanned in pencils)
                                    Flats                      (Start to colour the image with flat, mid range colours)
                                    Texture                  (Paint the skin and textures in the image, hair etc)
                                    Shade and Light     (Paint the shadows and lighting)
                                    Background           (Create a background, this will often be part of the image as a
whole, and will be done along with each step, but with a caricature doodle like this one, often I'll wait until the character is done to see what might look good behind him. All depends how the drawing goes to begin with, and which doodle I chose in the first place.)

At this stage I chose to use a more flowing style for the lines, and no thick contour line, as that would give it a more comic book look. I wanted this to feel more cartoony.
Most of the concentration goes into making sure the line weights are in the correct places, according to where I chose the light source to be coming from.
I chose top right, so the thicker lines will be placed all lower and to the left, thinner lines upper and to the right. Sometimes it doesn't look right so you can use a little artistic licence, just not so much that it's just plain wrong!

See you in step two!

                                                           

'URP....

One last post for the day, a doodle that carried on until it turned into this.

I'm off to do some reading and then get some sleep, have a good one all!

"You Crazy Man!" - Colour

So, I couldn't resist throwing some colour on the sketch from earlier....
Nothing too serious, just wanted to see how he'd look!

Now back to something slightly more serious.... Only slightly though! lol

"You Crazy Man!"

Hi all!

Had a slight break for a few days, as things have been pretty busy, but whilst browsing online this morning I came across this photo of a crazy guy pulling all sorts of strange faces, and just had to sketch one of them!
I'm going to get working on something later on today (Concept art for my graphic novel series) so hopefully will have some more pics to post soon.

Hope you all have a good day whatever you are up to!

Ghost Rider - Final

I'm about done with this I think!
I could go on further trying to refine the flames, but as this image will most likely be mostly seen on small screens like phones and tablets, or at it's biggest a monitor, I think I will hold up well enough.
One mistake can be to spend so long on something you lose interest and the picture suffers for it, or you just plain and simple over do it.
The chains as a frame aren't my creation, I just downloaded a seamless chain texture I found online, but I thought it gave it a nice touch.
Anyhow, I'm off to draw something different!
I didn't mean for this painting to go on for so long, but I've only had an hour or two most days since I started on Friday, and didn't work on it at all over the weekend, it's almost Fan Art Friday again! Haha
Maybe something a little less time consuming this week might be a good idea, my comic book project hasn't been touched art wise for a week or two so it'll be nice to get back to that too.

Hope you all have a good day, the weekend's in sight again!

Ghost Rider - Progress 05

I'm now approaching the home stretch of this painting, yay!
Now all the colours are done, it's just a case of going over the flames again and smoothing them out a bit here and there where they're not looking so good.
Then I have an idea for one final detail to add and I shall be calling this done.

Hopefully that'll be either later today or failing that, tomorrow evening.

Ghost Rider - Progress 04

Hey everyone, hope your weeks are going well!

So I finally managed to get back to my Ghost Rider painting today, and onto step four and the flames at last!

This seemed like a really daunting task when I sat down to get started, but I'm happy to say my first experience with painting flames has been a fun one so far.
It seems after doing some research that there are many different techniques to painting flames, all of which will give different results in style, and different results in realism.
For this I took it that my level of realism would end up maybe somewhere in the middle, if I'm lucky!, as it's my first go, so I thought I'd try out a mixture of two approaches.
The first is to outline the object in question, use the stroke function and from there use the smudge tool to produce the flame shapes.
The second is to paint them directly.
So this is the result so far of the two combined, it is still only the blocking in stage (I guess that's obvious as the flames are grey) but it's nicely in a place where I can mess around with the shapes with little fear of ruining the picture as a whole! Just adding flames with the brush, and shaping them with the smudge tool.
This will be going on for an indefinite amount of time, just until I like the way it looks and decide not to go further.
Once I'm generally happy with how they all look I will colour the flames themselves, using the colourise feature and the history brush to get the level and gradient of colours I want.
Then I'll go over them again with a combination of the standard soft and hard brushes to sharpen up and fade out everything where needed.

Ghost Rider - Progress 03

Step Three is done, all the detailing needed is added in. It doesn't look all that much different from the last stage, really it's just the lower jaw and shadows that have been worked on.
I could've gone on longer but I'm happy enough with it at this stage, the image isn't going to be huge in resolution so I think it will be fine like this.
The next stage will be starting to block in the flames on a new layer, once that's done it'll be refine them and adding light reflections from the flames onto the skull, during which more detailing will be added, hopefully sharpening up the image as a whole .
Not to sure what after that if anything, it depends what comes to mind or seems to fit as I'm working on the next stages, that's the fun part of a painting like this, being able to adapt and add as you go along!
Either a plain black background will be added, or maybe that along with something to frame him, I'll decide closer to the final stages.

Not sure when the next update will be, probably not until late tomorrow night.

Hope you all had a good weekend!

Ghost Rider - Progress 02

Progress step number two!

I've now got all the blocking in done and have moved onto starting to get some detailing done.
As you can see I've spent more time on the top half than the bottom, so next session I will have to switch it around and try to get the bottom half looking as good as the top.
Generally I'll be moving from one area to another, adding in more and more detail as I go and sharpening up the image as a whole, that way you don't get bored of working on one bit, and the painting takes it form slowly, but as a whole rather than one spot.
It's not always done this way when you are drawing on paper, but then you would be smudging your artwork all the time if you were darting back and forwards over it!
Digitally you can work in various different methods, so really it's just up to you to experiment and find what you like best and gives you the results you are looking for.

For now here is where I'm up to, and I shall be leaving it here until I'm up to the point where the skull is ready to start adding the flames.

Have a good weekend all!

Fan Art Friday - Ghost Rider Painting Progress 01

Fan Art Friday is here again!

This week I thought I'd start a new painting which I will post step by step as I reach various stages of it's development.
The reason for this is that time has been limited this week, and is limited today, so rather than rush a sketch of something just for the sake of it, I thought another progress piece would be better.

This weeks subject is Ghost Rider, a Marvel character which I thought would be good to do as it will involve painting something new (flames) which will be a challenge for me, and something I have drawn several times before (skulls) which will be fun!

The progress so far has been to locate and save various reference images, and whilst doing so I found one which was an ideal position so I'm using that.
I sketched out the skull roughly, but not being totally happy with it after scanning it in and checking for mistakes (the handy flip canvas action in Photoshop, which I have set up to a hot-key to save time) I decided to use the original image and the warp function to better line it all up and get the proportions correct.
This is a great time saving method to use when you need to get things done quickly, whether it be for deadlines, or so you can just concentrate on the areas of artwork you need to improve on.

Another handy time saving tip is to sketch out a face or person once, get the proportions all correct, and then photocopy, or if working digitally duplicate, them several times over. You can then use these duplicates to practice lighting and shading from different angles, or add different clothing or hair styles etc for concept art.
Any time saved is time you can spend on learning or practising something else!

Anyway, back to this painting!....

Now I had the sketch the way it should be proportionally I moved onto the painting itself, and at this stage I have started blocking in the main areas of shade and light, have added some of the forms of the teeth and jaw, and have started to introduce some varieties of colours that will be used.
As usual at this stage you must make sure you don't start to get caught up on any detailing, just getting things blocked in.
I will leave adding the flames until the skull is looking the way it should, although this will mean altering the lighting again once they have been painted in I would prefer to have the skull looking right first as I know this is the main object in the painting.

No Escape - Final

Hi all,

As promised here is the result from yesterday's step by step progress piece.
It's funny how an idea can present itself even at the last few moments of what you think is the finished picture.
I had been toying with the idea of the title (No Escape) having a double meaning of being trapped in the Straight Jacket, and at the same time being trapped within his own insanity.
In the end I had decided that the piece kind of showed both sides anyway and thought I would leave it as it was... Until at the last moment saw another idea, that could portray both with only a slight change.
The background could be altered easily to look like the Iris of an eye, and he could be the reflection in it, or, indeed in his own eye!
I have for now shown the basic idea in this image, but I think I shall definitely revisit this picture soon, and create a whole new background very similar to this, but with a whole eye, and a little more work on him looking more like a reflection of himself.
For now I'll call this version of it done, mostly so I can move onto Friday's Fan Art piece.
Which I'm not even sure yet who or what it'll be featuring! (I only considered the other day that Fan Art doesn't have to always mean characters, it can be places or things too!)

Hope you all have a good one!

No Escape - Progress 03

I've now added some lighting to the hair, done a ton more blending on the face, shaded the straight jacket and given him a bit of a five o clock shadow. I've also added a suitable intense background to help portray his stress.

The blending is a lengthy process of going over and over with varying shades of skin tone, with the occasional use of the blur tool when needed. Some blue is added in the cool areas of the face, such as the eye sockets and around the lips, but only a hint, he's not dying or in the Antarctic!

Mottling is added on the cheeks and forehead to give a bit more of a realistic look to the skin.

I've done a little more work to the mouth area too, but it still needs to be gone over again to sharpen up some of the edges, and I may still add some whiskers around his upper lip and chin (still undecided on that at this point) 

I also decided whilst looking at the picture as a whole to leave the detail on his feet as it is, his face is the focus of the image so the detail should become less on parts that are further away.

Still undecided if I will change or add anything to the background, I'm thinking to leave it apart from maybe some changes to the levels.

All in all nearly done, which is good as I thought I'd be working on this for a couple of days on and off.

Also, is it just me or is he looking a little like Ross from Friends?!...

No Escape - Progress 02

In this next step I have started adding the hair and eyebrows, and have added in the basic lines for the straight jacket.

To do the contour lines I tried out a technique that may not be the best way, but has an interesting advantage. As the character is on a separate layer in Photoshop I utilised the layer effects options, using the stroke option gives you a decent contour line if the image is of a large enough scale, and the added bonus is that if you want to reshape part of him, say his cheek, you can simply use the eraser tool and the contour line will move with the shape you create with it. It also can work in reverse, add in a few brush strokes and you can enlarge his cheek, and the contour line again will just move into place.
I got this idea whilst thinking about how good it would be if Photoshop had a smart move tool, which behaved in the same way as the move tool in Zbrush when sculpting.
The closest would be the smudge tool, but that just doesn't work in the way I want it to, for adjusting proportions etc.
I should really just do all of that in the sketching stage but like many others I'm always too eager to just jump in and get some paint on the canvas.
I shall endeavour to pace myself in the future, as I know it is the best way to work.
But still, I want a move tool like Zbrush's! lol

Anyhow, the contour lines are done with that method, and the inner lines drawn.
Next steps will be to shade the jacket, continue refining the mouth area with more detailing, soften the brush strokes some more on the skin to get it blended better, and add in lighting on the hair and eyebrows.

Once all of that is done I'll finish it off by adding facial hair/stubble, going over a few times adjusting the lighting and shadows, add a background and call it done!

No Escape - Progress 01

So I thought I'd post little updates as I work on this, so anyone's who's interested can see some of the stages the painting goes through.
Also it'll be nice to be able to look through the steps myself!

So after yesterday saying I would do a comic book illustration slightly differently from a painting in the inking, it got me thinking and I decided I wanted to try out a combo of the two.
An image where the character has a contour line around his silhouette as you might do in a comic book, but also has the features and shadows painted without clear inked lines.
At this stage I have blocked out the main features, and blocked in the main areas of shadows.
Also I have added the contour line (which I might do again but neater, although at the moment I do kind of like the messy, jagged look to it, we'll see how that goes later.)
He lacks hair, which I will hopefully have started for the next update, and no lines on the straight jacket yet.
At this stage though I'm not worrying about details and perfect lines, it's just getting the colour scheme and feel of the picture the way I want it. I have spent a fair bit of time making sure the teeth and mouth area is started, as that is a major part of the image and having it looking good will help me "see" the final image as I'm working through it.
I've also added the lettering behind the character, but whilst working I have that layer in Photoshop turned off, switching it on and off occasionally to see how it's all looking.

No Escape - Roughs

I've not posted for a couple of days so thought I'd show what I've just started working on.
This is just the first rough sketch of the next painting I'll be doing, a guy in a straight jacket screaming!
This is quite typical of how I like to work, first draw out a sketch in pencil, scan it in and roughly ink in Photoshop, then on a new layer start painting.
Then once the painting has enough detail I'll delete this sketch completely and just keep painting until I'm happy, or my hand cramps up and I have to stop!
If I was doing a comic book image or page the process would be the same, but this part  would be done with far more care as the inked lines wouldn't be deleted, and the colours would sit beneath them in the final picture.

I'll be working on this when I can over the next couple of days, and hopefully will have it finished in time to do something for Fan Art Friday, on Friday!

Fan Art Friday - Spider Jerusalem

Fan Art Friday is here again!

This week I have completed a painting of Spider Jerusalem, from Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan.
He was such a fun character to paint, as his face is plain, but has a lot of expression.
As usual it's a sketch done in pencil, scanned in and painted in Photoshop.

Hope you all have a good Friday, I'm very much looking forward to the weekend, more artwork, drinks and lunch out and shopping!

Caricature Doodle

There was no post yesterday due to a dodgy internet connection, and being out for most of the day, but that didn't stop me doing some artwork in the evening!
This is what I came up with, a doodle if ever there was one.
No real point to it, and it's not of anyone in particular, just sketched a Caricature and got to painting.

Dredd - Final

I think I'm going to call this done as I could probably just keep going and going on it, I may still go back to it in the future when I've improved skill wise and add some more, but for now here's the end result of my first adventure with painting!
It was a lot of fun, and I will definitely be doing more of them, in fact I know exactly what I'll be doing for Fan Art Friday next week and am very much looking forward to working on that!

Hope you all had a good night last night, and enjoy a relaxing Sunday if you can.

Judge Dredd WIP Cont.

Today's post is a continuation on yesterday's Fan Art Friday Dredd painting, and I'm happy to say it's coming along nicely!
I'm really liking painting this way, I mean I've never actually tried painting traditionally, but I'm liking the digital method so far, and no brushes to clean at the end of each session! (Yay!)
Here's today's efforts, still need to go over his face and teeth some more, then some fine tuning and the background (Thankfully I know what I'm doing there and it shouldn't take too long) and hopefully I'll then get it all wrapped up tomorrow morning.

Have a good weekend all!

Fan Art Friday Dredd WIP

Fan Art Friday is here and this week it's a bit of a work in progress.

I thought I'd try my hand at digital painting, and decided Judge Dredd might be a fun subject to try it out on, as his face is all craggy and old, so lots of dips and bumps to shade, fun!

Anyhow, didn't realise the time as it it gets very involved and now have to rush out, so only really got a start on his face after completing the line work. And so this will be continued over the next day or so, with an update each evening.

Until the next update, have a great Friday night!