PROCESS VIDEO // morning glory

For this month’s process video, I put together my drawing process for my morning glory flower painting! I feel like I use a lot of techniques here which are generally useful for digital painting, so it seemed like a good one to share. 

Here’s some information about this process video: 

• It has been sped up by 250%, so 2.5 times the original speed. 

• This painting session took me about 2 and a half hours in total. 

• I mostly used the hard round brush from my own brush set to paint this, as well as the MaCaLabs HB Pencil brush to sketch. 

• This is painted in Adobe Photoshop, but the same workflow can be applied to most digital painting software, with the exception of the gradient tool which I use from time to time in this process video. 

Here are some helpful resources that can help understand this process in more detail: 

• Stylizing trees & plants: This tutorial runs you through how you can exaggerate and stylize a flower, or any kind of plant, into your own interpretation of it.

• Lighting as a design tool: This tutorial talks about how you can approach lighting in a non-realistic way, and change/exaggerate it to suit your own design needs. 

GOING FROM SOFT TO SHARP 

There are a lot of sharp, fine details involved in painting flowers like these. There’s the thin and twisty vines, the sharp-tipped leaves, and the details on the flowers themselves. I often struggle with the urge to capture those details right away, because I feel like they’re so important to conveying the flowers correctly! However, I usually find that it’s better to wait. It’s much more productive to build softer value differences first. You can see me do this around 6:10 minutes into the video: I start adding the segments of the flower petals, but then get rid of it. I then zoom out and focus on getting more color variation and contrast in the lighting instead - something I do with a softer brush and with gradients. Once I have more complexity in the colors and lighting, adding more detail can be done in a balanced and restrained way. I give it another shot at the 10:27 mark, and I feel like that works a lot better this time around!

SLOWLY BUILDING COLOR COMPLEXITY

If you’ve followed my tutorials before, you know that I am a big fan of slowly building up your color scheme! It really helps to have 1 or 2 colors that work, before adding more - something you’ll see me do during this painting process. I know that I want the colors to be stylized and “unrealistic” so that the drawing doesn’t feel like a literal depiction of the flowers, but more like an interpretation - so I want there to be an iridescent effect to the colors, with a lot of vibrance. However, in the beginning, I just focus on getting the blue and green right first.  I gradually add more colors after that: first some more yellowy tones at the 16:25 mark, some deeper blues/cobalt hues at 34:32, and then more orangey / pinkish hues at 42:33 using replace color. Adding new colors is something I do constantly through the painting process, and I also regularly adjust/modify the colors with selective color throughout. 

ADDING A SATURATED EDGE TO THE SHADOWS

This is such a helpful rendering trick! Basically it involves taking the edge of a shadow, and making it brighter/more saturated - kind of like what is shown in this image here. It’s usually applied to really specific lighting situations, but for a painting like this, I add it to all of the shadows - it makes the image more vibrant and interesting! The best way to do this is to create a new layer, pick a warm hue, and set the layer to overlay. Paint some of this warmer hue over the edge of the shadow and you’re done! You can also just select the edge of the shadow and boost the saturation/color within that selection.  You can see me do this at the 30:58 mark, first painting the shadow and then selecting the edge. If you find that your lighting setup feels a bit flat, definitely try this one out! 

I hope you enjoy this video, and as always, feel free to ask any questions you may have after watching it!