'Photoshop'

Software Used :

Hi, my name is Bartosz Biełuszko and I’m character artist in People Can Fly, Poland. Professionally I’m a 3D character artist, but I decided to I wanted to practice my 2D skills at home and so I created this image. I was in Napoleonic mood, because of some games I was playing, and I wanted to create some mad, elite soldier so I thought that would be nice to connect this Napoleonic style soldier with some dark fantasy.

When I had this in my mind I started by collecting some references of soldiers from that century. And then I made my first quick sketches of this soldier (Fig.01).

I then picked a pose that suited me best and I started further work on this sketch. At that moment I had a random none-pure-white background, and my canvas size was rather small (Fig.02).

I was happy with this where it was going and so I increased my canvas to a bigger size and started cleaning a sketch and adding some characteristic details for this soldier (Fig.03). With the sketching done, I was quite happy with the design of my soldier. It came out the way I wanted him to look. He looks angry and pissed and you definitely don’t want to mess with him!

Now I was ready to add in some color. At this point I used standard Photoshop brushes. My sketch layer was locked and set to Multiply. I locked this layer because I didn’t want to paint on the sketch anymore. I find locking layers very useful for me, because I often forget what layer I'm working on at a given moment.

So the sketch was locked and set to Multiply, and I was working under this layer. At first I created an overall shape mask; this helped me a lot while working on this image. On a separate layer I filled the shapes with the flat colors of my soldier (Fig.04).