PROCESS VIDEO // emergence - part 1

I put together the process videos for Emergence, my most recent painting! It consists of two parts - this is part 1 of 2. 

Some info about this process: 

• The process has been sped up by 250% - so a bit over twice the original speed.
• This painting took me about 5 hours to make.
• The brush I used the most was the hard round brush from my own set - https://loish.net/free-goodie-bag-for-digital-artists. I also used the Macalabs pencil brush to sketch the initial lines: http://cbr.sh/fg8up?ref=loish

IDEA SKETCHES

I start out by making a bunch of sketches around the idea of a character emerging out of nothing. This is an idea that I have for a future art book that I may or may not end up actually making - but I wanted to start out with this character suddenly appearing and then gradually exploring a world around them. So for the first 15 minutes I'm just exploring random ideas on how I could convey that. I might end up going back to some of these sketches and rendering those out as well!

BUILDING THE COLOR SCHEME

I very quickly go from my initial sketch to working on the color scheme. I don't really like working out the details of a sketch too much, because the amount of detail that I need to kind of depends on the rendering style and that's something that I figure out when I'm adding colors. I knew that I wanted it to have a kind of glowing and mysterious effect against the dark background, so I focus on different ways to convey that from the 15 minute mark onwards. For this part of the process, the combination of lasso and gradient tool is most helpful for me. It allows me to quickly create a rough color setup that works well from a distance and gives me a clear idea of how I want the final image to look.

SKETCHING ON TOP

Once I have my rough color set up, I usually carve out the detail from that. You can see me do this about 35 minutes in - I get my hard round brush and just start working out the details of the character on top of the rough colors, which always feels a bit like sculpting them out of a rough block. It's just a lot easier for me to figure out the detail when I have a better idea of how I want the final image to look. The hard round brush is the perfect brush to do that because it allows me to blend and paint as well as add sharp detail to the image. During this phase, I keep making changes to the color scheme using the feathered lasso tool and color editing tools - that's something I keep doing throughout my drawing process! It's never too late to check if the colors could be improved.

I hope you like it! Part 2 is coming right up ~