WARNING: CONTAINS NUDITY

Introduction

Hi! My name is Jesùs Conde and I'm from Venezuela. In this tutorial I'm going to explain a little bit about how I work and I hope this help you to become a better artist. By the way, I should say that I don't consider myself a great artist – I still have a lot to learn so you'd better teach me something in return one day!

Please understand that this is not a step-by-step tutorial, because I don't really like to be that mechanical. It is more like showing you the stuff I did and the result so that you can apply the techniques to your own paintings.

Let's get started!

Inspiration & Line Art

Sometime when I'm searching for inspiration on a particular subject, I just do some research about that them. I often look for music that relates to it, such as movie soundtracks, as this helps me get in the mood to draw the subject (Fig.01).


For this painting it wasn't particularly hard to find material that would help me. I just looked for The Dark Knight soundtrack, pictures of the character I wanted to draw, and pictures I could use as references for the poses. I worked with some pictures from a friend, Daniel Ilinca, who took amazing photos of his beautiful wife, Ana Maria. She's great; I love her poses!

Sometimes I receive criticism for taking poses from pictures, or taking colors from them, as other people see this as cheating, but I don't look at it that way. I think that whatever makes you faster in the creative process is more than welcome (Fig.02).

Starting The Painting Process

When it comes to painting I really like to be quick because I love the part when I take care of the little details. So at the beginning I do all kind of steps to be faster and get to part I enjoy the most.

Step 1: The Basic Colours

I feel kind of stupid saying that I start by applying the basic colors, as there's not really another option. So I just started with flat colors without getting too complicated. I used one layer for the background and another for the character. Once I had the color layer done, I made two copies of the character layer it – you'll see why later (Fig.03).