Loish

PROCESS VIDEO // rising - part 1

Added 2021-01-26 13:23:12 +0000 UTC

I started putting together the process video for a painting I finished last month: Rising! Here's the final result:

The total process took like 15 hours, so I’m dividing the process into separate parts. This is the first part, where I set up the painting. I didn’t speed it up, so you can see in real-time how I approach the early stages of a digital painting (although if you want to watch it faster, you can change the speed using the gear button)!

By the way, apologies for the wonky layout! I had another image open on the left side which I can’t share with you guys (yet) because it’s client work. So there’s just a grey rectangle on the left side in this process vid.

Some pointers for this process video:

I use pretty much the same process as for my digital sketches: starting with a fast and loose sketch using the macalabs HB brush, and then adding some simple color underneath with the lasso tool and hard round brush. I think it’s really important in the first stages of a digital painting to focus on gesture and movement in the initial sketch! The more I render, the more I lose that movement, so I want to maximize that early on. I can always change the details later, those are less important during the sketching phase.
I mainly use the lasso tool to figure out how the colors and values will be distributed. It makes it easy for me to quickly apply color and also use gradients for some softness. For an overview of how I use the gradient to paint, check out this post!
This phase of the painting - where I’m basically setting up the piece and working out the pose, color scheme, and overall composition - can be super messy and have lots of ‘mistakes’, like weird hands. I fix those later on. The only thing that matters at this stage is that the main ingredients are there so that I can focus on those details at a later stage.

The next part, where I flesh out the details and get the image ready for the final rendering phase, will be posted later this week! Hope you like this one and - as always - let me know if you have any questions by commenting or sending a DM here on patreon :)