With the basic colours established, I can start rendering. I find it easier to gadually build up the rendering from dark to light - this first pass will define the forms with mid-tones. Hopefully, the detail shots will help to show how I approach this stage.
I begin by colour picking from the area of the painting that I intend to work on ( shoulder and upper arm in this case ), then shift that colour to be slightly brighter to provide me with my mid-tone, maybe also shifting the hue to make it slightly warmer depending on where I'm working. I'll then use a soft brush to dab this colour back onto the area I want to render up, working very gently to keep the opacity low. This lifts the general brightness in the area, without obscuring too much of the underpainting. Now I'll swap to a hard-edged brush and begin to slowly work up the forms - I approach this very much as if I was using pencil crayons, or scumbling with oils, gradually building up the colour with a series of light, repeated strokes. Using a texture on your brush ( see A note on brushes ) really helps here. In some places ( veins and around the chin and eye ), I may use a heavier stroke to introduce some hard edges, working back over them with soft strokes if necessary. I'm mostly adding lighter tones here, just occasionally colour picking a dark colour to add a hard edge here and there.
This process continues around the image, taking care to work within the overall pattern of values layed out at the beginning. For the most part, I'll remain at 25% magnification for this stage, though I'll zoom in to 50% here and there where I want to tighten things a little further.
Background :
Now it's time to throw in a background. I follow a very similar pattern here to the rendering process above - colour picking in the area that I intend to work in, shifting the colour to provide me with the hue I want, then dabbing with soft and texture brushes before finally working in around the character with hard-edged brushes. I choose quite a strong green here, as I like the way it contrasts with the red flesh, and introduce some blues around the bottom. An abstracted background such as this can be very useful in balancing out the composition. The flow of the picture up to this point is very much on the diagonal, from bottom left to mid right, through the angle of the rock and the placement of the demon's limbs ( red arrows ). I'm hoping to balance this by introducing a contrasting flow in the background (white arrows ). If I've done it right, the flow should converge on the demon's open hand, reinforcing it as the principal focus in the image.
Details :
Hmm. I can't put off tackling the contents of that hand any further. Several ideas have come to me while I've been working - a captive fantasy damsel, a kitten, the remains of a brave warrior. None of them seem 'right' somehow, so I decide to play safe and go for a skull, with a few other bones scattered on the rock. I build up the skulls in the same way as the rest of the image - painting in dark base tones first, then layering lighter colours on top, until they're at the same mid-tone rendered level as everything else.
