Software Used:

Photoshop

Introduction:

Man-Eating Plant was created for a Drawing Jam and was my personal interpretation of this famous plant. In this Making Of I‘d like to show my working process and I hope this will be of some help to others.

Tools:

In most of my images I just use one or two main brushes and some custom brushes, but this always depends on their specific need. I really like to combine those brushes with the Selection tool – this gives me the opportunity to get crisp edges and to just paint certain areas in my images (Fig.01a – c).

Fig.01a	Fig.01b	Fig.01c

Workflow:

I don’t know why, but I’m a big fan of layers. I always try to keep my layers until I’m happy with the look and feel. After that I reduce the layers to one and start working on a newly created layer. It’s probably easier to show you my workflow instead of telling you, but I’ll give it a shot. I usually start by drawing a selection on a new layer for the shape I’d like to paint. Once I’m happy with the shape I start to block in the main color. Normally I hide the selection, but I’ve kept it for this example for a better visualization (Fig.02a – b).

Fig.02a

Fig.02b

My next step is to create another new layer and roughly paint in the shadow areas (Fig.02c). After the shadows are painted in I start erasing the parts of the shadows I don’t need. This process goes back and forth. I do the same for the mid-tone areas and highlights too. For the highlights I usually draw in smaller areas and paint/erase them on a separate layer. I’m still using the same brush for painting and erasing (Fig.02d – f).

Fig.02c

Fig.02d

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Related Tutorials

If you liked reading this tutorial, you may also be interested in the following. "Making of Mantis Queen" By Nick Miles The Mantis Queen came about through my desire to push the boundaries of abstract form within my work whilst maintaining what I deemed to be a coherent, clearly identifiable character silhouette.  For a while now I have been incorporating abstract patterns and shapes into my own work and I wanted to see how far I could push this. "Making of Monster Face" by Ivan Kash When you have some spare time, it's always nice to draw something for your own pleasure, something not connected with your work. I'm very fond of drawing different creatures and characters, evil and good ones. So, after reviewing some photos, references and pictures by other CG artists I decided to do a monster portrait.