Death is coming, you ready?

STILL LEARNING

Some people have asked me to share a tutorial on making digital art. One of the facebook groups asked me to do a session on digital art during one their meet ups. I would love to share the knowledge that I have. That’s the main purpose of this blog. I wanted to share all that I know to a wider audience and not just limit it to the boundaries of facebook. But I need a lot more practice. I’m clear about the concepts, but I feel I have some short-comings when it comes to putting the knowledge to practice. I too have learned from various other artists and what I realised during the process is that every artist is unique. No two tutorials are similar to each other. All of them have their own approach. However, the concepts are similar.

I promise, once I feel I’m completely confident about the my style I will definitely share a full length tutorial on digital like I did for HDR and black and white photography.

CHAOS FORM CONCEPT

This piece is also inspired by the hack-and-slash game DARKSIDERS2. Like I have said before I love Death’s design better than War’s. While playing the game, the player fills up the chaos meter by slashing the enemies with various combos, which gradually fills the chaos meter. Once it’s completely full, the player can trigger the chaos form which is nothing else, but the reaper. This one here is death’s corporeal form and the one I have painted below is the ethereal, or like its called in this game, the chaos form. The player can unleash very heavy damage to the enemies and take very little damage in this form. Click on the image to download a high resolution version as a wallpaper.

Death’s chaos form. Order a Limited Edition Print of this image.

TECHNICALITIES

I again ended up using close to 150 layers for this piece. I spent about 50 hours on this one at a stretch of 4 weeks. Because this time my focus was on detailing. So you see explaining the whole work flow step by step using screen shots will be very very complicated. But like I said, I will come up with a tutorial in future. Better yet may be I’ll make a speed art video. For now, here are the steps I used.

1. I used this screenshot from one of the youtube video as a reference to make the line art on a blank new layer at 8000 X 4500 resolution, which is basically the 16:9 resolution.
2. Below the line art layer, I created a new layer and named it base. Here’s where I did the base coloring. Here i just fill the color with a hard brush at 100% opacity. No need to be very careful at this point. Just fill in the colors like you used to do in your coloring book back in the art classes during which you attended during school.
3. Now comes the hard part, detailing. But it is also my favourite part, because here is where you add life to the image my giving it a 3D illusion.
4. Create a new layer on top of the sketch layer.
5. Assume a light source and start painting highlights and shadows. Here I use a round brush at 50% opacity. I start painting the shadowed area using black lightened area using white and gradually reduce the intensity as I move to the center of the spot that I’m currently coloring.
6. Once I’m done doing this for all the parts of the image I create a new layer on top of all the existing layers and I added a bit of texture using various texture brushes on the mountain, the scythe blade and the walls.
7. I added the clouds
8. I now flatten the image to add final touches.
9. For finishing touches, I added a lens vignette using nik colour efex and sharpened the over all image using smart sharpen tool from filters menu.

I used sandara tang’s brush set to do this painting.