Today We Part by Chris van der Linden
04/05/03 @996 | Martin | comments (5)
I'm a fairly unknown artist around here although I've been active in the art and gaming community for over seven years now. I started out doing art for games like Quake after which I moved to digital painting. My work as a portrait photographer has influenced my art in a few ways, mainly my approach to composition and lighting techniques are drawn from my experiences as a photographer. This tutorial is a step-by-step coverage of how my latest painting was done. It shows how I work and hopefully will be of help to you, at worst it'll be a nice read :)

Final Painting

Here's the story behind the painting which is very important in my work:

The character sitting on the pole looking out onto the sea is a sort of personification of a 'lighthouse' guiding the lost into the right direction. In this particular setting the character meets with the dark side. With a stern face he directs the demons towards the left into the bright clear sky. An epic face off between the light and the dark.

Everything is done in Photoshop 7 but most tools and techniques are similar throughout earlier versions of Photoshop.

Step 1

Step 1: The first sketch

I always use a square canvas as opposed to most other artists. This is because I use a square film format in the photo studio and I'm most comfortable with creating solid compositions in a square canvas. Because all my new paintings are intended to be printed and framed up for exhibiting in a gallery I work at large sizes. My sketch is done on a 7500x7500 pixel canvas, which is 60x60 cm/300dpi.

I use a hard edged brush set to near full pressure so it flows easilly and I don't have to re-trace my strokes so much. I decide on the basic colors for my piece at this stage which are blues and light yellows. My experience is that a limited color setup works best for most pieces as it makes a painting easier to read than one with a lot of different colors. It also helps to set a very easy to recognise distinctive mood, a clear morning in this one.

Step 2

Step 2: Working on the sketch some more

With the story in mind I darken the right side of the sky with the Burn tool to create the basic backdrop for the cloud of demons. On the left I add a yellow glare of sunlight on a new layer. The hotspot is painted with pure white to create a very bright shiny effect. In these sketching stages I don't mind about little details very much and everything is kept very loose and spontaneous. You can see that the clear morning atmosphere is mostly gone now in this stage but that's ok with me. The time of day in this piece is not important in my opinion, it's more important that the story is portrayed properly.

Step 3

Step 3: Adding the demon character

The painting is about the face off between the light and the dark side so I add another layer and sketch out the demon character using black linework. The perspective was a little tricky and I couldn't get it quite right until towards the finishing of the painting. I block in the gray color on a second layer set to Multiply so it blends in with the linework.

By this time my scratch disk has grown to about 1,5GB! I flatten all layers to keep my workflow optimized. I understand that this limits the ability to correct mistakes in a later stage but most of the time I'm confident about working on one single layer. Keeps things exciting not? ;)

Step 4

Step 4: Cloud of demons

After the main demon character was done I added a few more demons to shape up an entire dark cloud. Again I used a sketch layer with black line art and another layer on top set to Multiply to add the fill-in color. I merge the two layers and add a Gaussian blur to it all, after which I Fade/Filter that effect again to let the original sharp sketch blend through. By now the light and dark side in the painting have shaped up quite nicely.

Step 5

Step 5: Adding Textures, Desaturating the colors

At this point when I'm happy about the basic looks of the painting I start adding some texture layers. These textures are taken from old dirty paper and other materials. I paste them onto my painting and make them black and white layers. Using a variety of blend modes like Darken, Multiply, Linear Dodge/Burn I blend in the textures with the painting. Since I didn't like the overly comic look of the demon character I pasted some heavy textures onto it's face. Most of the original sketch work got lost by this but I don't worry about that too much as I have other plans for this part of the painting.

I desaturate the colors in the entire painting because I decided to go for a more cold and 'dark' look. In my opinion the two sides in the painting immediately come closer together and are more evenly balanced than in the brightly colored version. 

Step 6

Step 6: Creating the demon face

Since I wasn't very happy about the look of the demon character's face I gathered some skull photo's. Using parts of different pieces of bone and texture I put together a new face on a new layer. I'm not sure which blend mode I choose for this new layer but you should just try out which one works best. Setting a medium transparency blended the new skull face in just fine. Moving up close I sketched some new linework onto the skullface as well to match up with the pastel painted feel of the left character. Lastly I used the Dodge tool again to bring out the cheekbones and other important parts of the face. Right this beginning to look spooky not? Good!

Step 7

Step 7: Detailing the white character

The white character has been left virtually untouched since the very first sketching stage. Time to work on this some more. I pasted some more dirt and scratch textures on a new layer and set it to Dodge, Burn and Multiply to achieve some nice layered effects. Using normal painted strokes I jump in and detail some of the flesh parts as well as the sky between the two faces. I set my brush to a medium opacity so I can paint fast and loosely without having to wory about destroying things. I darken some parts of the white character's body to give it some more 'weight'. Dodge and Burn works best for me. Some very simple strokes at the left make the impression of water ripples. 

Deciding that color at this point doesn't help me at all I get rid of it all together planning to throw it back in at the end. The painting is beginning to look like 'one of my paintings' more and more now, usually it takes quite some time before my distinctive style begins to show through.

Step 8

Step 8: Adding clouds, nearing the end

At this point I'm happy with the characters and leave them for a bit. The clouds and the sky as a whole still look very ugly because it's the old sketchwork basically. I paint some clouds on a new layer using black, mid gray and whites. Setting the layer to Multiply or Overlay (I'm not sure anymore) blended the extra clouds in nicely and added a cool 'thunderstorm' look at the base of the demon cloud. The Bright hotspot on the left of the image was tampered quite a bit which turned out to be a good thing as it leaves the very bright whites to the characters face instead of the scenery.

Step 9

step 9: Final image

Since I got rid of all color in my piece it's time to add some splash of color again. I selected the left character and copied it onto a new layer. I used Hue/Saturation set to 'recolor' to make it brownish. The underlying layer was recolored to a blue hue to create the contrasting warm/cold feel.

In the final stages of any painting I usually go wild on strokes and scratches. I paint over allmost the entire piece manually with light strokes using a hard edged brush set to ultra low opacity (5,10). This finishing stage takes me anywhere between two and six hours, I usualy can't tell afterwards how long I've been at it. I make sure that all textured and painted parts blend well together and the piece looks coherent. The water ripples have been worked on some more and I raised the contrast a bit again. I add my signature to the painting and tag it 'finished'.

Most of the time I don't feel like a painting is ever finished and I spend many hours on it re-working some parts even months after doing the original.

Conclusion:

I like the end result a lot, both technically as storywise. What I dislike is that some of the 'depth' and swing I had in the earlier versions seems to be lost in the final image. If there's some things I would change than it's going back in again and try to get some of the flair of the sketches back in.

Ok I hope you've enjoyed reading this, if you have any questions feel free to contact me! My personal homepage is located at: www.whitecluster.com

cheers

Chris van der Linden

Full tutorial: http://www.gfxartist.com/features/tutorials/17758