Öblivion V - work in progress

I made this base image for the painting. I didn’t just use a blank canvas, but instead I started to paint on this photo based image of some rocks. I transformed the pic into black and white and also added a black gradient at the top + adjusted the brightness and contrast just a bit. This way I had a nice color palette and values to work with right in the beginning of the progress.

Photo base for the painting.

What’s new in the picture so far? I did some detailing to the airplane and adjusted the colors a bit. And of course there is the girl sketch in the foreground that you haven’t seen before. I’m not sure yet what kind of pose I’d like the girl to have, and the one I sketched here, seems somewhat boring. So I will probably try to find some good pose (and lighting) references and try some alternative poses before continuing.

Not the final sketch of the girl. I will probably make few more in order to find a more fun and interesting pose.

The painting is quite nice none the less, and I’d like to continue it as a non-commercial work. I’m thinking about adding some characters to the foreground and some palm-trees + some interesting details and stuff!

The unfinished bomber painting

Luau Bomber close up 1

Luau Bomber close up 1

Öblivion IV

Here’s a close up of the face area, I you want to observe more closely.

Close up

This is the sketch that I used as base for this painting. I did this sketch perhaps a year ago.

Black and white sketch

1. First, lower the opacity. I used about 40% opacity.
2. Set the layer blend mode to soft light.
3. Reduce the saturation of the texture layer to almost black and white
4. Add layer mask and erase stuff out of the texture layer from those parts, where it looks too striking. The texture shouldn’t cover everything, just bits and pieces. Erase textures at least from deep shadow areas.

Now your texture should be blended in pretty smoothly, like in this WIP -picture. Now just continue painting on top of the texture layer and it will be covered with regular layers, thus making them all blend together nicely.

This is how you use textures in a digital painting.

Öblivion III - 60 minutes in Photoshop

Here’s a quick sketch I painted today. I used about one hour on this and I was actually about to continue rendering this, until I realized that I’d like to, for once, leave a painting at this stage, and not to ruin it with trying too hard.

As usual, I painted this in Photoshop with my Wacom Intuos 4.

I love the famous and much used sketchy painting style with rough brush strokes with high opacity. It’s very popular among the digital painting scene. I am not unfortunately very good at this because I often use soft basic Photoshop brushes with no textures and I tend to smoothen out the edges between strokes. I was tempted to do so this time also, but managed to resist. I guess it’s a skill, in a way, to be able to leave a painting unfinished and move into a new one.