'Photoshop'

Introduction:

I painted this piece for a “Character of the Week” challenge at ConceptArt.org; the assignment was to create a half-animal, half-human thief. I had recently been watching a nature documentary and was blown away by the variety of textures and forms that cephalopods come in. The texture and eyes of the cuttlefish became my main inspiration. 

The Sketch:

The first step was a doodle in the sketchbook. It started as an unattractive drawing, running off of the page, and was later scanned and completed digitally. It’s a wonder that I didn’t abandon the project here, but I thought that the composition in the sketch was good right off of the bat, with a nice relationship between the character and the background - and the thief already had the right attitude, at least in the upper body. The legs would be adjusted later (Fig.01).

Setting up to Draw:

One of the first things I do when drawing digitally is overlay my sketch with a quick perspective grid using the line tool (U) in Photoshop. Keeping the perspective guide on a separate layer at the top allows me to toggle it on and off as I’m working, to ensure that the objects I draw will sit in space properly. I fill a new layer with white and drop the opacity to around 80%. This serves as my primary drawing layer and allows me to see both the sketch and the perspective guide when positioned in between the two. 

For most of my drawing I use the standard hard edged round brush with pressure sensitivity set to opacity. Sometimes I draw with the 6D ArtPen hardware, whose chisel tip has a thick side and thin side that Photoshop can track. Drawing with that pen has a great feel, but the lack of buttons usually sends me back to the standard pen before I get to blocking in any colours. (Fig.02)

Tightening up the Drawing:

I have the “flip horizontal” command mapped to one of my keys so that I can flip my drawings back and forth, preventing my brain from getting used to seeing the image in any one particular direction. It makes errors of perspective and form jump out at me. Here you can see the image flipped, the perspective guide hidden and the drawing opacity turned up to 100% to block out the sketch. It’s already come a long way from that little doodle (Fig.03).

In this image the greyscale toning has gotten a little further, creating a nice graphic distinction between background and foreground. I don’t like to go too far in greyscale because too much black can kill the colours. Now it was time to start laying in some base textures and colour (Fig.04).

I dropped in some base textures from photos as early as possible, because I wanted to integrate them by building the painting up around them and layering brushstrokes over them. It didn’t matter if they looked choppy or out of place at this point. Having the perspective grid available as a guide made it easy to transform (Ctrl + T) photos of brick and the rug to sit at the correct angle on the ground (Fig.05).