Introduction

Welcome to my digital illustration demonstration. There are many ways of creating a digital painting.  This is just my way.  I've been trying my best to mimic my traditional oil painting with digital media and have found Photoshop CS2 ideal for this purpose. I tend to stay away from various filters and plug-ins while I work.  I have a big library of custom brushes that I hardly ever use.  Most of this painting was done with the same 4 brushes used at varying sizes and texture levels.  These 4 brushes mimic the flats and filbert brushes I normally use in oils.   Throughout this illustration I used very few layers: one for the background, one for the foreground, separate layers for both figures, plus a few adjustment layers, and that's about it.  I don't have a super fast computer so having few layers keeps my file size down and allows me to slush pixels around without any ‘slow-downs'.

Human Touch began as a sketch I did for an old CGTalk competition a few years ago.  Due to work I was unable to move beyond the sketch stage until recently.  I always wanted to go back and finish it when I had the time.  Even though the title of the competition screamed for it, I'm not really into the whole dark post apocalyptic theme.  Instead I decided to paint a simple narrative of a husband and the lengths at which he would go to save his dying wife.  I wanted to create a poignant scene that depicted the moment when the pressure sensors in the remains of the woman's upper torso became active so that she could once again experience human touch.  The challenge in this painting was in trying to design believable robotic parts implanted into her chest cavity.  I wanted to create a brightly lit medical laboratory that looked convincing enough without taking away from the focal point of the illustration.

Concept Sketches

Each Illustration starts from creating thumbnail sketches.  For this painting I wanted to play with another laboratory environment, only this time I wanted to convey the idea that the viewer is outside looking in through a space station lab window (Fig01 and Fig02).  I played with art nouveau inspired designs for the outer hull of the space station.  Background figures and additional lab equipment were indicated through the porthole style windows.  Since the focus of the illustration was the interaction between the two main characters, I decided that all this extra environmental detail was unnecessary and had to go (Fig03).






While creating rough drawings I am always thinking about mood, lighting, atmosphere, size relationships, composition and the overall concept.  After producing some loose thumbnail sketches I then create a rough final drawing as a guide for my next few steps.  For me, this stage is the most fun, as here I begin focusing on character and costume designs, architectural detail and other background elements.  Depending on the illustration, machinery and other conceptual designs are all worked on as well at this stage.

Gathering References

With a fairly good idea of what the composition and overall concept would be, I set out to find reference materials for the figure and environment.  I spent time looking at art deco style stained glass as reference for various computer panels.  Photos of hydraulic lifts and computer wires were also collected.  A photo shoot of professional models was done for the figure references.  I also looked up photos of radiation burn victims and amputees.  I knew going into this that there needed to be a distinct difference in skin colour between the man and woman.  She needed to appear sickly and pale, with burns and scarring on her upper torso (Fig04).