I’ve been knuckling down and learning head construction.
They say that one of the best ways to really improve at drawing something is to draw 100 of them.
Well 11 down, 89 to go!
Head Construction Sketches Part 1
Female Face Digital Painting: Yanadia
I moved on from sketching to a full digital painting.
This has also been an opportunity for me to design another one of my digital comic characters: Yanadia. She doesn’t feature in the current project but will appear in a future instalment.
Female Face Sketching Part 3
Here are the female faces from the last 2 nights. I’ve been experimenting with different face shapes. I like the chin on the last one.
Female Face Sketching Part 2
More female faces tonight.
The thing with people’s faces is this: you make one wrong move and it looks nothing like them!
Female Face Sketching Practice Part 1
Trying to get better at female faces.
I’m going to do as many as I can over the next few weeks.
Painting Practice: Elf Maiden Face With Light Rays
I’m switching over to character design practice for a while now (starting off with female faces).
In this one I wanted to learn how be a bit more dramatic with lighting, hence the shaft of light on her face.
Line sketch: 
Blocking in colours: 
Changed my mind about the colours: 
Adding in more detail and changing the hairstyle: 
Adding in the shaft of light:
Her mouth looks a bit odd to me so I think I might hunt down some mouth drawing exercises.
Flintlock Pistol Digital Painting Part 2
OK so now I’ve got a flintlock pistol under my belt (not literally but you know what I mean). Hopefully that’ll help me do steampunk weaponry for my digital comic project.
In case you’re interested, I used this image as a reference: http://gunsofold.com/images/washington_flintlock.jpg
Flintlock Pistol Digital Painting Part 1
In order to learn how to paint steampunk pistols, I thought I’d start with having a go at a flintlock pistol.
- Blocking in the wood base colour:
- Adding a bit of varnish:
- Blocking in the steel and the brass colours:
- Adding in the dark steel accents:
Basalt Island Digital Painting Study Part 4
Tonight I’ve finished off this study by doing the water. Again the Shaddy Safadi tutorials gave me a real boost here.
- On a separate layer with just the water area selected, I brushed in the water highlights:
- Then I created a water accents layer and brushed in the accents (darker areas):
- Using Gimp’s Bristles 01 brush for painting in and erasing out, I built up the wave details:
I learned some really useful techniques for rendering rock faces and water in this study:
- Block in with a solid brush.
- Use separate layers for block-in, highlights and accents.
- Use textured brushes to then refine the highlights and accents.
- For doing waves, first put in strong confident strokes and then chop them up into individual waves.
Basalt Island Digital Painting Study Part 3
I wasn’t happy with the basalt rock so I watched a few tutorials by Shaddy Safadi (this guy is awesome) and then went back to the blocking in stage and started again from there.
- Initial block-in:
2. Blocking in the accents: 
3. Using Lock Alpha Channel with a textured brush (Acrylic 2) to give the accents some texture: 
4. Blocking in the highlights: 
5. Locking Alpha Channel and using a textured brush on the highlights: 
6. I tried to add a bit more texture to the accents layer with a large textured brush and a selection around the rock island only: