'Photoshop'

Hi, my name is Roy Stein and I am a VFX artist and illustrator based in London, in the U.K. In this short “making of” article I would like to share with you the process of creating a digital painting from the basic idea to the final artwork, using my recent image, A New Bride as the basis for the explanation.

With this particular piece I started from the basic idea of a dark portrait of a beautiful woman combined with some gothic/horror elements – which is a genre I already love working with and have much experience in. The notion that it would be a frontal depiction of the character was decided upon early on, I just wasn’t sure of the story behind it or the color scheme at the beginning.

On a visit to one of London’s cathedrals, I saw a statue that gave me the inspiration I needed. It was an early 18th Century depiction of the grim reaper covered by a semi-transparent cloth. This obviously blew me away, and so I immediately sat down to work and came up with the concept of death’s minions delivering a girl.

I started by opening a new document in Photoshop – a tall composition due to the nature of the artwork’s subject (a medium portrait). At this stage you might want to work on a smaller sized canvas, bearing in mind that this stage is for finding the lines and composition, and a smaller canvas allows you to work much faster with little or no lag.

I usually draw the main character and the background elements (the grim reapers, in this instance) on separate layers, as that way I can play around with the positioning until I’m happy with the layout. I find that working with a blue color allows me to sketch the main forms in the best, without being distracted too much at such an early stage – probably something I’ve kept from my early animation studies, using blue pencils.

After spending around 20 to 25 minutes sketching I merged down the image layers, and ended up with the line art all on one layer, above the white background, using the Hue/Saturation tool to convert the blue lines to black in preparation for the next step (Fig.01).

The second stage of the process, and perhaps the most important, was all about the color palette and overall tonality of the image. I created a new layer underneath the line art layer, and with a large soft brush started to build up the general color scheme.

Now this is my favorite stage, because everything you do here will more or less set the feel and look of the final piece. I chose brownish/greenish tones that were very sickening, and provided a great contrast to the human skin tones that I wanted to use for the girl. Right from the start I knew that typical white sheets on white skeletons would be too common and not very interesting at all. And what I was also looking for color wise was a way of framing the girl that would support the line art composition from the earlier step (Fig.02).