[process gif & walk-through] how i painted this DnD portrait!

heyo friends. this is a portrait of a DnD character that i painted as a gift! i'm going to be explaining each stage of the process here for the exxxtras tier, for those who are curious about the process.

this was painted in Clip Studio Paint, and took a couple of hours, maybe four? i didn't time it. i didn't use lineart for this, which gives a more painterly effect, and i really like it! it's also a lot faster for me. i like to change things up every once in a while. it was a pretty simple painting, very zen and low effort, but i think for that reason it's interesting to look into the thought process behind it.

sketch

i use a pencil tool with an ochre colour, which i have set to 'multiply' in the tool settings. that means with each pass, the pencil will layer over itself and get darker like real ink. as well as drawing things, i'm also finding large areas of very dark shadow, to make sure i have depth in the picture. you can see them behind the hair, inside the hood, for example.

a thorough sketch is pretty imperative because later on i don't feel like moving stuff around too much or coming up with new details.

i like the ochre colour at the minute for sketches that i paint straight onto. it reminds me of oil painting, and the colour shines through into the final picture and gives pops of colour!

multiply layers

to begin with, i use multiply layers on things i know that will be the main aspects. (multiply layers add colour, while letting things shine through underneath. it's ideal for blocking in large sections of a sketch.) it also allows me to begin finding the values of the picture. ('values' is referring to light or darkness.) a good range of light and dark things breaks up a picture, and gives you clear edges. in this example, the shawl is a dark green, because this makes the bright white hair and shirt stand out.

i'm also finding the value of the skin here. ('finding' is a way of saying: experimenting with paint until it looks nice. :'-D )

beginning paint over

this is the stage where i begin daubing paint right on top of everything! i begin to refine the facial features, using my sketched lines as a guide. i also gave the hair a nice gradient, since the light is hitting the top of his head. i'm keeping my light source in mind at every stage, but especially here. light is coming roughly from the top left.

i didn't use reference for this drawing, because i can dip into my own comfort zone for all these things. (since i've drawn them a tonne of times.) but at this stage for a more specific and hard to draw character, i would go looking for references on exactly how medieval cloaks look for example, or for unique facial features and how light reacts on them.

i'm keeping it loose, making sure that i don't spend too long on any one section, but generally i'm focusing detail on the face, because that's the most important area. detail draws the eye into it.

i'm also using very dark colours in some areas to show intense shadows. these super dark shadows give a good crisp edge to things. for example, the hair around his neck stands out far more with an almost black shadow around it. this is a technique used in lots of historical oil paintings, and it's fun to look out for it. it's called occlusive shadows/ambient occlusion, but i always say to myself in my head; "black to deepen!". i think it looks best when used sparingly. i could go into far, far more detail because this (the difference between ambient occlusion and normal shadows) is kind of difficult to explain, but i recommend googling it, because other people will be better at explaining this phenomenon than me! (Marco Bucci has a good video on youtube about it)

i just went looking in my files and very quickly found some good examples of "black to deepen". the first one is by Sargent, second one is Zorn.

more painting over

this looks pretty similar to the last one. it's just more things being painted. i love this stage, i can just go into a flow state and refine things. again though, keeping it loose, and remembering to zoom out to check how things look quite often. you can get lost zooming in, and adding way too much detail in one spot. lots of the original sketch is still showing through.

i'm keeping in mind all the time 'gradients gradients gradients', because things look good with gradients on them. for example, the shirt has a gradient from bright white to grey, and the shawl has a gradient from gold/green to a more greyish, emerald green on the right. i'm using more saturation in colours closer to light. the antennae are a gradient from pale at the base to dark at the tips, etc etc.

another thing i'm keeping in mind while painting is 'don't overthink it'. things will be fine in the end, just think 'light source, colour, edges'. it becomes second nature. where is my light? will this be saturated? will this need a hard or soft edge?

i'm switching brush types a lot here. if you do like that mixture-of-brushes look, it's good to have a handful of brushes that you know well, and switch between those. i can only really use about 5 at a time, because any more and i'd spend too long finding them in the menu, and testing them before using them to see what they were like. usually i switch brushes because i want something with a hard edge, or more opacity, vs something soft or see-through. 

sorting out values and edges more

not to sound like a broken record, but that's what i'm doing here in the final stages too. edges need to be defined, like the edge of the hood, and the edge of his arm on the left. i separated the wings so that i could neaten everything out and paint them more easily. up until then, i was just adding strokes all to one layer. (actually i usually make a new layer to add things that i think might look bad, and then merge down if it looks okay.)

to get the values looking even better, i use 'overlay' layers at this point. mostly that involves taking a low opacity brush and using a dark or light colour to make a bright thing brighter, or the inverse. (interestingly... this is one area where digital is way easier than traditional art. can't exactly do overlay layers with real paint!) i used a very pale bright yellow for example, on the light area of his hair, to brighten and saturate it even further. i also use lots of small overlays to define things, like the edges of his hair on his forehead. towards the very end, i used a large brush to do one big dark (but pretty subtle) overlay around the perimeter of the picture, fading like a vignette inwards. this makes sure that all my lightest values are in the centre of the image, where i want the eye to be drawn.

i also loosely painted in a background with a multiply layer in a simple and unobtrusive colour. this is because i wanted the hair to be the brightest part of the image, ergo the background must be a darker value than that.

final touches and colour correction

this is when i transferred it from my ipad to my PC. this is because my PC monitor has far better colour capabilities and a better display. 

i moved his wings on one side because the perspective was janky. then to finish, i darkened everything, fiddled with the levels and pushed the tint more towards pink because i tend to make everything overly green-ish when selecting colours. i highly recommend using 'filter>camera raw filter' if you're also using Photoshop. it's meant for fine tuning photos for photographers i think, but that gives you extreme amounts of control over a drawing too. you can increase saturation of one particular colour, or decrease one, add grain, add vignette, and mess with all kinds of things. another tip is that if you feel like you've gone too far with any kind of alteration, you can use 'edit>fade' to roll it back a bit.

i added stripes to the shawl with an overlay layer. after drawing the stripes following the contours of the fabric, i went back in and erased edges of them where they would dissipate into folds. if you keep details like that to only well-lit areas, it can keep the visual noise (busyness/too much visual clutter) to a minimum.

feel free to give feedback on this style of walk-through! it's quite therapeutic to write for me, i know i'd be interested in seeing into another artists process. i just hope that i'm doing an adequate job of explaining things. there's literally endless detail that i could go into, so i tried to keep it to the most important things. happy painting!

-D