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).

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).



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).