OFDW17: Step By Step

What is one to do when feeling out of practice? How about an Online Figure Drawing Workshop over at CG Talk? The general idea was to copy one of the provided images, posting your progress along the way for crtique by all the participants. Just for fun… Just for practice. I decided I wanted to revist a technique I developed in college where I’d start with a detailed graphite rendering, then paint over that drawing. Back then I’d constantly run into the physical limitations of traditional media (guache was my weapon of choice then) so my attempts at this technique meet with varying degrees of success. Given that most of my illustration work over the last ten years has been mostly quick and dirty photo-collages (with the odd drawn or painted bit thrown in for good measure) I wanted to try my hand at at fully-painted digital illustration… and this figure drawing workshop seemed like the perfect opportunity. Here’s the play-by-play:

1. I started by picking this photo reference to copy. (the photograph is the property of http://www.characterdesigns.com). As “tracing” is considered “cheating” on CGTalk, I used a grid to facilitate getting the proportions right.

2. Using the grid, I was able to get the initial linework down fairly quickly. I worked fairly loose with a 3H pencil on 15x20 marker paper.

3. Once I was happy with the line work, I began rendering the image with 4H pencils… working mostly top-left to bottom right.

4. I continued the graphite rendering, working on the darkest areas first, building them up slowly with light, short strokes, altering the stroke direction a few degrees to build with the density.

5. More graphite rendering…

6. Once I had the whole image rendered with a 4H pencil, I switched to progressively softer pencils to build up the dark areas.

7. At this point I scanned the drawing into photoshop and extended the hatch lines to the edge of the background with the clone tool. I knew I wasn’t really interested in concentrating on the background, but I wanted just a little texture in there. The working image size at this point is roughly 4000 pixels wide.

8. I duplicated the sketch layer and set the new layer to “multiply” to generally darken the image and intensify the lines.

9. With a hard edged brush set to medium opacity, I began by making a mess of things… really just trying to darken in the background.

10. I continued by lightening the figure and darkening the edges.

11. Here I masked out the figure to restore the original sketch values and darkend further the background.

12. Just added more nuance to the background in this step.

13. With various random textured brushes in photoshop, I applied a rather distressed pattern to the background.

14. Here I’ve adjusted the levels overall in photoshop.

15. A couple tweaks with “variations” and a little hue adjustment gave me this basic tone.

16. I went back in and painted in a basic cool tone for the background color (I think the transfer mode was set to “color”)

17. I started roughing in redd-ish under-color for the hair.

18. Ah… the first tast of actual painting! Just the face and hair at the interestion of the arms. I used mostly a stippled brush set to %10 opacity. With the wacom tablet sensitivity set at medium, I was able to build up the colors gradually by making numerous quick passess…

19. Rendering the rest of the hair, working dark to light—again, with a stippled brush set to %10 opacity.

20. Here I’ve begun work on the arms, using a color palette of five colors… again working dark to light, still with the stipled brush in photoshop. To blend the colors, I slowly layered in the lighter colors over the darker ones…

21. Just continuing on with the arms and hands…

22. …and the upper body.

23. …and a leg…

24. …and even more leg…

25. …and that other leg!

26. And Finally, after a few days rest, I went back in and painted over some of the shadow areas with the background color… very subtle passes at very low opacity. After that… just some very slight levels adjustments… and… done! (or maybe just out of time)

 

Final Thoughts:

Total execution time: roughly 20 hours. (pencil rendering: 10 hours, digital painting: 10 hours)
Pixel Dimensions: 4000 pixels by 4800 pixels.

I found it kind of odd that it took nearly ten years to come full-circle on this type of painting… from developing things in this fashion back in college, to fully-realizing the end result as a digital painting. What now? Next?