Saturday 26 May 2007

New work, untitled3

As a starting point heres a reasonable walkthrough / process on a recent piece. I get asked about my process so i will just use this post to give you a rundown on how i go about doing things. I work primarily in painter and photoshop, the latter really for smaller details, colour correction, levels etc etc. Coming from a tradional painting background i find painters ability to mix and lay down paint more intuitive.



For this piece i just went straight into sketching the composition digitally, sometimes i do roughs with good old paper and pencil, it just depends on how strong the image is in my mind. As you can see from the above, after getting a rough compostition down and finalised i then go on to do a hi res drawing- in this instance it was done in artrage which is a great and unbeliveably cheap app. Next its a rough colourkey.

I actually tend to work on each element in a seperate file and then bring everything together in a final file once each piece is about 90% of the way completed. Below is a sequential image of the tiger being painted. The last 2 frames show it after a clipping path has been added, then to soften the edges, a layer mask is added and brushed around to help that layer to sit with the rest of the painting.



Heres a quick look at the hair in progress... (the halo is just there as a rough placer at this point)



The 3 main elements were done in much the same way, tiger, girls skin and bird all painted in painter in seperate files and then brought into a final file.



After bringing the elements together and roughing in the background i added the dress, necklace, halo and background pattern, then added additional lighting highlights, midtones and shadows on seperate layers, flattened everything down and copied it to a new file where i added some noise to soften the image slightly and thats it done. Below is the final image together with some detail shots.



3 comments:

Alistair Holt said...

Absolutely smashing. Gorgeous work Tom.

Anonymous said...

First of all I'm impressed thay you've done it with no photo reference material that's sets you appart from many other cg artist who notoriusly use copy grid technique for ex.

I've visited your portfolio and I'm impressed with your skills - but to be honest I prefer your earlier works ( http://www.mostlywanted.com/sketchbook/01.html ) than the recent ones - IMO they're much more fresh and live :)

I've bookmarked your blog and can't wait for next pieces (and yes, that's great idea to show the process :))

Anonymous said...

I just came across your work through the Illustration LCSV portal and thought your new piece was breathtaking. I enjoy reading/watching an artist's process/

I, too, bookmarked your blog for future updates! Looking forward to more of your new work.