2DARTIST MAGAZINE | ISSUE 136131the rings was made by using a square brush
with white, followed by a low opacity Airbrush
using Linear Dodge mode. Once the key visual
elements and major shapes were mapped out
in this stage, I moved on to adding values.
03
Form and light direction: I created
a new layer and started painting in
values underneath the rough lines layer. In
this image most of the armor wrapped around
the forms in a circular fashion, so I used a
soft Airbrush which allowed me to make
quick gradations when blocking-in values.
I started by filling the character out with a light
base value and then placing the core shadows
to establish the main light source. In this piece
I placed my light source at the upper-left side
of the image to have the dark shadow values
contrast with, and emphasize, the flaming sword,
which would be painted in later. Generally
when painting I leave extra light effects and
secondary light sources until the end of the
process because the 3D form of a character
should read well with just the main light source.04
Refining forms: This step is usually
the longest part of the process; I was
done with rough planning and ready to render
for the final image. Once I was satisfied with
the overall values, I lowered the opacity of therough line layer to about 15% and merged it with
the underlying value layer. At this point I had
decided to keep the background really simple
and just have the character as the focus, so I
erased away the stray background lines. While
keeping the light direction in mind, I used the
Sharp Edge brush to harden cast shadow lines
and render out the separations in the armor.
I also looked to bring more definition to the
character by adding in occlusion shadows.“I placed my light source
at the upper-left side of
the image to have the dark
shadow values contrast
with, and emphasize, the
flaming sword”Establishing the main light source for the imageGradually rendering
the major forms and
starting to think
about details