Making Of 'Cigar'

This is more a step-by-step of showing the way I work than a "how to" technical tutorial, not sure if it makes any sense to you all, so please let me know if you want to see more contents with technical skills ect. That maybe I can balance it better by next try. This sketch is done using Adobe Photoshop 7.0.

Step 1

This is the typical way I start off, I filled the background with a warm gray that I already had my nice midtone. Then I threw down a few strokes with the default simple round brush set to fairly big size, by which I can see the silhouette and big shapes better. At this moment I didn't yet know what I was going to paint, I was still waiting for the "happy accident".

Step 2

I let things go a bit further and kept watching what those abstract shapes could tell. It's important to keep it spontaneous at this stage so that you don't get stuck with one idea too soon. After hitting a few more strokes I saw some potential qualities in the shapes, I then decided to paint a car.

Step 3

The design was based on a 'Three Wheeled Speedster' I did a while back. It's always good to setup lighting at early steps, which provides you a base for working values out. In this case, light was supposed to come from almost right above. I quickly blocked in some main parts of the car, you can see here I used a dynamic perspective, which was just considered for the fizz, not really necessary.

Step 4

I was kind of looking for a monochromatic color scheme, but some color variations were still welcome. I then laid a picture, which was a scan of my acrylic paintings, separately over the top, set the layer to mode soft light. It's a lazy way to achieve textures, not very ideal, but quick and easy. I've learned this through studying 'Craig Mullins' work, if you find it useful you should really thank the generous mister. You can do this either at the very beginning or at the end, depending on your working habits.

I kept defining here and there. Since most of these sketches were supposed to be quick concepts there weren't really much room for details, so the main concern was to solve the form. Um, I'm not that satisfied with the solution though, well, at least I gained some experiences for the next painting.

Step 5

I gave a final touch to the car, including pulling out highlights and tightening up some parts a little bit. Of course I could go on detailing forever, but as said above, once I had the form and main values solved I'd leave it how it was and back to the painting as a whole. I was about done, the environment needed some work still. I added some reflections to the ground to suggest the material, and some floor lights to accentuate the perspective, that helped add some depth to picture too.

Final

That's it! You can also recall the final version below.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

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