Still, I'm finally managing to write a blog post, and it's Halloween! Fortunate then that I have a creepy picture to share today. That I finished a month ago, but haven't had time to blog about really (and may not today - there are halloween things occurring outside the webosphere of course). Let's start; see how far we get. You can, as always, click the images to see them enlargerized with Embiggen-O-Ramavision.
Okay, so that there is the piece under discussion. If you want to skip to the end or just glance at the pictures I'll get the big details out of the way first. Painted in Photoshop, based on this lovely stock photograph by AmethystDreams1987. Took about three weeks on and off. OK, we're good, off you go.
For those that are sticking around, I guess we can go into a little more detail.
The above isn't the painting, it's a rare time I'm posting a reference right on the blog. So the idea came about for this one when I was trying to work out a good way to paint blood, for entirely unconnected reasons. I picked an image and started painting over the photograph. Got the blood looking pretty reasonable, and then thought 'well, if she's got blood all over her hands she should probably have Vampire like eyes. And the background should be black, and maybe she's been crying.' Which is how I arrived at the above image, Which is of course what I based the actual painting on. Why did I chose that particular image to test the blood on? No idea, it just appealed at the time.
So I decided to paint that, and started working on the line art, using a grid to lay it out (4x4 if I remember correctly - might have been 6x6 though). You may notice one of her eyes (the left, on the right) looks better defined than the other, which is thicker and darker. That's because I zoomed in to do that one. The rest of the sketching was done zoomed out so I could see the whole image. This resulted in an interestingly inaccurate scribble when I zoomed in later...
You can see that there's a box over the sketch. This was when I wasn't sure if I wanted to change the composition, and was trying to work out something that might work better. In the end, I liked having the box there more than the idea of cropping it more, so it stayed, and morphed into what you see above. The horns came about because I've been trying to paint something with horns for a while, and I thought it would be more interesting if she wasn't just a Vampire after all.
Colour wise I used the technique of throwing down fairly random bright colours so they show through the final layer and get a little mixed into the 'paint'. Gives the flesh a little life it might otherwise lack. I was going to leave her jacket black, but at the last minute thought red might work a little better (I'm sure a combination of Michael Jackson and Akira played their part on my subconcious).
The next stage was more or less to just speedpaint in the bold strokes for most of the picture. This left me with some observations. I'd made her finger too long, but maybe that worked with the Demon thing - I'd decide later. The back of the jacket, even when more fully rendered, was going to be a big distracting white space, so I'd need to throw something back there. Was her hair reading as blonde? Or was the colour choice swinging it toward green? I realised I hadn't remotely captured the shape of her nose too, but I sort of liked it like this. For the most part I thought I'd just keep going and work things out as I went. I don't think I touched it for 10 days after this though - I was busy.
When I finally came back to it I started working on what I thought would be the most difficult bit (it was the most time consuming): Her jacket. The 4 stages here probably took about a week to do, at around an hour a night. There was some extra cleanup later, but not all that much - this was mostly it other than the addition of the skull afterwards. The toughest bit wasn't all the wrinkles surprisingly; rather it was the elasticated sleeve. Getting that too look soft enough was a real challenge. The actual jacket looks to be cotton, but in painting it it began to look slightly satin. Well, that worked out fine, so I ran with it instead of trying to fix it.
Part way through that lot I did a quick mockup of how I wanted things to end up. We'll get to the logo on the back and the neon later, but here you can see I'd started to work on those things fairly early, and then hid them as distractions. The skull emblem was just quickly warped in Photoshop to fit on the back at this point. In some ways I prefer the more subdued neon and the blue background to what I finally ended up with. Ce la vie.
There's a lot going on in these two pictures, so let's break it down. On the left the main change is the hair, and the rough in of the horns. The method for the hair is more or less the same one I usually use: Start with the big shapes (you've seen that bit above) and then use progressively smaller brushes to add smaller and smaller detail. The only real difference this time was the few strands hanging over her face - for those I painted a strand quite dark, and then masked it and went in again for the highlights.
On the right I've added the rimlight and neon as well as detailed out the horns. I've also fixed the length of her finger, and gave her mouth a bit more of a pout (more like the reference). The horns are the only part of the image where I've used a textured brush (other than the background). I was having real difficulty getting them to look gritty enough with just my usual flat brush. You'll note that the overall lighting is basically the same as that in the roughout - I just built layers of light and texture over that until I got bored.
The rim light was tricky, because I couldn't find a reference of a decent resolution where the subject wasn't completely silhouetted. In other words I had to guess how much penetration the red light would have through her hair. Since I'm doing this in Photoshop I took advantage of it here, and painted that on a separate layer with the screen blending mode on. This let detail show through, rather than having to manually retain it while painting.
So now we get to the skull. I'd done this earlier of course, but I'd needed a skull that was a bit cool, a bit creepy, and potentially sort of feminine. My answer is above - A screaming demon skull with a bow in its mouth. It's not all that feminine really, but this is 2015; it doesn't have to scream pretty princess or anything. The skull isn't pulled from anything by the way, I just doodled a skull and then cleaned it up a little bit.
Here is where I've started hand painting the skull in, but you can also see the blood, additional rimlight and where her makeup has run. The blood and the rim light are sort of the inverse of each other. The rest of the rimlight is done with the same Screen mode system I mentioned earlier, while the blood is the opposite - a Multiply screen mode over the existing form. The highlights on the blood were just picked out with a light hard brush. Easy.
So the skull here isn't just a straight trace of the warped one I'd done earlier (which you can see as a faint pink I'm working over). Instead I tweaked it as I went along to better conform to the angles and folds of her back. This means I essentially drew the skull from scratch again, with the earlier warped one as a rough guide.
For the neon sign I used Photoshop magic again - It's a path set to outline, and then the outline treated with some outer glow layer FX. Very quick to do, but the downside is it slows PS down quite a lot at this scale, so I had it turned off while actually painting.
And here's the final again, so I can talk about it. Most of the changes between this and the last were 'post' effects - layers on top of the actual picture meant to tweak things that would be slow to do in other ways. There's a colour modifying one to push the foreground a little cooler for example (the rimlight is unaffected, because it was on that separate layer in the first place). There is some work by hand though - the smoke is a large textured brush (it's the one I used before to paint the Reese from Terminator speedpaint), but then painted over with a regular brush for the highlights. All done!
And since I don't think I've put the original size image up anywhere, here's a snippet of it, matching the snippet of the original reference right at the top. You'll need to click it to get an actual full size look.
You know, I typed all that and only now do I realise I have a thumbnail as the thumbnail... And I did get it all written today, so Happy Halloween!
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