'Photoshop'

To make the main character I started with a separate layer. I opened up a new page and then started from a mid-tone to manage the color of it. I kept painting, building up the colors and introducing the light and shadowed areas (Fig.04). In this process I only used the Round brush, with Opacity set to 100% and Flow to 20-50%. For texturing the head of the turtle, I used a picture of an old wall and then deleted parts of it with the Eraser tool to make the texture blend better with the character. I then set the texture layer to Overlay and the Fill parameter to 59% (Fig.05).

After finishing the character I put him onto my sketch and started painting the background. The color of the background came from my imagination and so I didn’t need any reference material for this part. I opened a new layer for every object and every distance. Then, as I did with the turtle, I started painting the color of the background from the mid-tone, adding in lighting and shadow details until the image was finished (Fig.06).

And here is the final image (Fig.07)!

I was really happy with this image because I felt it really captured my initial idea about childhood dreams. I hope you found this Making Of useful in some small way and I’d like to leave you with one quick piece of advice: don’t worry about the concept or idea behind an image that you’re painting. If you love to paint then just sit down and do it and you’ll find that as your image develops it will tell the story itself.