Zub Tales

Tonight’s digital painting class felt like I had a Eureka kind of breakthrough in understanding some new ways of approaching things. Here’s the result of about 1.5-2 hours of experimenting with some new digital painting techniques:

Click HERE to see the progression of the piece as I worked.

Rather than starting off with a tight piece of line art (which is how I normally work) I tried to build up forms almost entirely with tone. As hard as it is to do when you’re starting with blobs of paint you have to trust yourself at each stage even when there isn’t much to look at. Having the Undo button and Layers in Photoshop makes that even easier.

Pencil drawing usually focuses on adding shadows to a white page. In comparison, painting is usually about starting dark and adding light to a piece, getting more focused and detailed as you go. It’s like pulling specifics out of murkiness.

The final change is not as big a jump as it may look. Tiny details are added, the overall ‘outline’ of the figure is cleaned up and several adjustments of Saturation, Brightness and and an added Overlay layer to punch up the colors makes the piece pop a lot.

It’s a step in the right direction as far as learning new styles and ways I can work digitally.