Woman Portrait 2

Another one done for fun. In this one I experimented with a new way of adding colour to a black and white sketch. You can find here a small step-by-step, as well as another version of the image in reds.

Woman Portrait 1

Done for fun. I wanted to make a nearly one tone image with one colour enhanced. For this piece I created some custom brushes to make some of the enhance some of the strokes.

Here is a small step-by-step of the process. I have created a short making of which you can find in my web site.

The full version image can be found here. Also, I created a black and white version and desaturated image, where the blue is enhanced.

Khal Drogo and Daenerys Targaryen

After a long summer break, here are the latest entries in my gallery. Khal Drogo and Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. I know you can find quite a few of these online, but I wanted to give it my personal touch.

Daenerys Targaryen

Khal Drogo

You can see and download the individual full version of these two images here:

        Khal Drogo & Daenerys Targaryen

and a small step-by-step here.

Future Yakuza Woman

This image was inspired by an image I saw of a tattooed Yakuza woman. Rather than keeping the full body tattoo, I changed it for something more electronic.

A bit of a making of together with the colour palette I used on the top left corner. I saw on a magazine a nice way of defining the palette and tried it with this image. The end result for the colour looks nothing like it is in the palette, but that is only because of some hue, and colour corrections applied along the way.

Digital Sketch: Samurai

A quick sketch from today.

Olivia Wilde (Tron)

This images was done for fun, to try and learn how to make a realistic looking portrait. I chose Olivia Wilde in the modern version of Tron.

I made a kind of making of, starting from the photo until you get to the image you see above, mainly to remind myself how I did it. Below I attach also some intermediate steps.

And bellow you have the photo comparison. I know that comparing the photo with the image I made you can see many differences. My goal was to simply learn the process and also to get use to using the Color mode layer, which is difficult to get use to initially. And as I said, if I were to spend another so many hours on this image, I am sure I would get closer to reality, but for a start, I think it went well. I am moving on .......

Digital Sketch: Mayan

Something from the past few days.

I have made myself around 50 watercolor shapes with real watercolors, scanned them and I am now trying them. I want to make human faces and bodies using only this set of marks. This one here has not been fully done this way, but it was a first test. More will come ......

Some progress images. I started in black and white to end up applying the colour and all the watercolour marks and shapes at the end:

More sketches at my web site.

The Immortal Art Challenge: Final Entry

Here is my final entry for the ImagineFX Art Challenge, Immortal.

Immortality comes naturally by been a Vampire, but it comes with a price. She still remembers herself beautiful, but the years walking the earth have paid its toll.

For this one I have created a brush for the skin texture which you can download here. The brush looks something like this:

Feel free to use it.

The Immortal Art Challenge: an update

Still working with my concept for the ImagineFX Art Challenge, Immortal. You can follow the progress of everyone there. I have started now playing with colours. We have 5 more days to go and still have not come up with a good background or colour scheme. Comments, suggestions or ideas are welcomed.

 

And again, some detail of it.

Underground Cities

Here goes something from the past few days. Once again I made this one pretty much using shapes. Still experimenting with them.

This is an underground series of future/alien cities.

You can find previous versions of it here.

The Immortal Art Challenge

I just entered another ImagineFX Art Challenge, Immortal. You can follow the progress of everyone there. This time there are a lot of entries, and very good ones. I guess this theme attracts a lot of attention. This time I went for a classic of Immortality, Vampires. Immortality comes naturally by been a Vampire, but it comes with a price. The Vampire I chose still remembers herself beautiful, but the years walking the earth have paid its toll.

 

I have started in greyscale this time, I will colour it later. I am not sure yet about the final presentation, but this is where I am at the moment with this one. I need to come up with a background now. For this image, I have created a custom brush for the skin texture which I will upload here at some point.

 

Some detail of it.

 

The Founder Art Challenge

A couple of weeks ago I joint the ImagineFX Art Challenge, The Founder. The title was a bit broad, so it was not clear where to head with this one. I decided to make a woman with a dress having an earthly texture. In fact, the dress was supposed to be part of the Earth itself. She was suppose to be walking around, dragging this earth like mantle and stirring life in the process. For that, I created a set of dress custom shapes (you can download them here). I spent some time putting these shapes in place. I ended up using about 50 of them to make the dress you see on the left. Using the warp and transform tools I carefully put them with the right perspective and gave them the right shape to follow the body contour. I wanted this dress only to define the shape of the woman, I was not planning in painting the whole body underneath later on.

Once the dress was completed, the main part of the job I was interested in doing was over. I wanted to played with these shapes and see what could I accomplish. I then created a forest kind of background, decided on some colour atmosphere (greenish in this case) and placed some elements to give it some life, like the foreground plants growing. The end result is what you see in the second image.

You can see a few more images in the Making of section of my website and download the shape set from there as well.

The Visitor

This is meant to show a Visitor arriving to what looks like an abandoned city, or district of a city. It is not clear what has happened here, but the place looks like is been like this for a while. I wanted to have another try at drawing a city. Most of the time taken to produce this image has gone into the central area of the buildings. It took a long time, this is not one of the usual sketches that I have been posting here. In order to make this image I created a set of brushes and shapes for some of the elements you can see here. You can see a Making of or download the brush and shape set from my website.

Fan Art Challenge: The Crow Results

Here is the final image that went into the Concept Art Challenge: The Crow.

I did not make the final three entries after all the votes were collected. The winner (with his particular vision of Ironman) is now at the winners museum. You can find the WIP thread for The Crow at the 3DTotal pages where I published my progress during the Challenge. Looking forward now to another challenge.

Digital Sketch: Woman Portrait 5

Another black and white portrait. As the other ones I have done, I used only one layer to make the grey scale image. But this one I decided to play with colour once finished. I am still trying to find the best way to apply colour to a grey scale image. I don't find it as easy as one would expect. In this case I don't like the end result, but here it is. I mainly used layers over the grey scale image on Colour or Overlay mode, but the result is not as good in some cases. Anyhow, it was just a quick test. The results are in the right hand image.

Digital Sketch: Home

This is an attempt at a landscape. Once again, I wanted to use shapes as much as possible. I didn't quite managed to get where I wanted with this image, and I am tired of it after two days staring at it. I still find landscapes complicated to get right. There are too many aspects to keep in mind, from perspective, to focal points, points of interest, light, colour mood, ........ I will have to keep trying .......

Digital Sketch: Knight's Battle

Here is another quick painting using shapes. I choose two knights, a fallen one and one standing over him ready to deliver the final blow. Again, my main focus with this is to simply play and use shapes to make the image look more interesting. I have done a few more shapes, so now I have a big collection of them. I am not focusing too much on anything else. Below you can see the image at different stages of the process. In the first one, only rough values are set, and all the elements established. In the second one I started to lay lots of shapes a bit everywhere. In the third one I started with the basic colour, which is later altered with hues layers. And finally the fourth one shows the final image except for the final touch of blurring the knight which is standing over the fallen one with the sword. I think it gives it more depth if he is blurred. 

Digital Sketch: Knight

I have been wanting to explore a bit more the use of shapes since I didn't know what they were, but looked useful. So I have been looking into first how to make them, and then how to use them. I have made about 10 of them, and I think I used all in the image you see here :) 

This is how I made them. I selected a black and white dirt image from a library, played with it, like motion blur it, added more texture from other images and so on. I then defined different shapes over this image and cut out the rest. With the shape in its final form, I went to Select Color range and took a few colour samples from the image. With the selection active, I went to the Paths tab, and click Make Work Path from Selection (one of the icons at the bottom of the Paths tab) and saved it (Edit -> Define Custom Shape).


I wanted to make a knight's helmet using these shapes. To make this knight, I have set down simple shadows and highlights as the base, and over it set all these shapes using different blending modes and shades. What you see here is what came out. I plan to do a few more of these using this set of shapes to see what happens.

Digital Sketch: Woman Portrait 4

Another black and white sketch. In this one I wanted to mainly concentrate on the cloth covering her. In the previous sketch I tried something with the cloth which I liked, so I wanted to make an even bigger piece of material. I used the polygonal lasso tool to draw the whole thing, one stripe at a time. Once finished with it I concentrated on the figure, and then to finish it up, I made a quick background. Some chains to indicate captivity (maybe ?) and the same pattern used in the cloth on the wall to maintain the theme. I am still using one brush for pretty much everything. I enjoyed making this one. 

Digital Sketch: Woman Portrait 3

The third sketch in the Woman Portrait series. I spent about 5 to 6 hours on this one. The pose of the face was a bit more challenging to draw than the other ones, but it came out ok at the end. I chose a zebra background for this one. I included a tattoo with the same pattern in her stomach but with the stripes going in the opposite direction. I think this gives it a nice touch. This one was done also in one layer, except the background, and using one brush. No layer effects where used here, its all sketching.

Digital Sketch: Woman Portrait 2

Another sketch in the Woman Portrait series. This one took around 6 hours to make. No differences in the making process with respect the previous ones. I try to use one brush for the whole thing, and maybe towards the end I introduce another one or two to make some textures. But the whole image is done pretty much with one brush. I want to keep it simply and do as many as I can to practice. The background again is not my own. I did wanted to have a cow skin background, so I searched for one, and after some altering, this is what came out.

Fan Art Challenge: The Crow Update

Here is an update of the Concept image The Crow. There is a week left to present the images and I am nearly finished. This is where I am at the moment. For the past days I have concentrated on filling the room with details, like the police band or the cat. You can see the first image I posted here.


You can find a better quality image at the thread itself at the 3DTotal pages where I am publishing my progress, and if you feel like it, please go on and comment, either there or here.

Digital Sketch: Woman Portrait 1

One more sketch. This one took around 7 hours to make. To be honest, it is not what I had in mind when I started. It was going to be another portrait for the Warrior Portrait series, but somewhere along the way it turned into this. As the other sketches, I started by measuring the different body elements against some reference photos before I started working on the face and filling the image with grey scale. I used a few layers, one for the body and a couple of others for the different clothes. Last, I used a few layers set to Overlay for all the lace parts on her clothes. As a finishing touches, one layer was used for the strongest highlights (set to Soft Light and using the soft round brush). The background is not my own. I just saw it when searching for reference material and thought it would look good. I adjusted the patterns to follow more or less the figure. I like the fact that she is a bit lost in the background. I think I am going to use that pattern for my next figure :)

Digital Sketch: Warrior Portrait 2

Here is a second sketch in this series of Portraits. This one took a bit longer, maybe between 4 and 5 hours. The technique was the same I used for the previous one (Digital Sketch: Warrior Portrait 1). I started in black and white and at the end added all the adjustments for the colour. I used the same background as I want all of the portraits I am going to be making to look the same. 

Digital Sketch: Warrior Portrait 1

Here is another sketch. This one has been done in less than 3 hours. I simply wanted to make a quick portrait of a woman. The decoration around her came later.

This one again I started in black and white. Nearly the whole thing has been done in one single layer (except the staff, face paint and hightlights). To finish the image, I used a Levels and Curves adjustment (very subtle changes to the image really), and last a a Photo Filter layer set to underwater (I know the image is not underwater, but it gives it a nice blue shade).

Comments are welcomed.

Digital Sketch: Gateway

After seeing and reading how people manage to make a digital concept in a few hours, or a day or two, I have decided to give this kind of exercise a go and set myself a given amount of time to start and finish something. So whenever I have the time, I will make one of these and see what comes out. I will be putting here these so called sketches. 


This one you see on this post has taken me about 4 hours. It started as a landscape concept, but I ended up cutting it as you see it now. I started by making a whole bunch of shapes with the lasso tool. Then I just filled them in with a brush at different opacities and values of black. I did not have anything particular in mind when I started. At some point I saw what looked like a gate between two of the tree shapes. That's when I decided to be less ambitious with my original landscape idea and simply cut that part out from the full image and work on it. 


Once I had the shapes and the image cropped, I started defining the shapes.  To start with, I worked in black and white, for me is easier in order to stablish the tonal range of the image. Then I used quite a few layers set in Color mode to start testing colour schemes in the image. I also used several Hue/Saturation adjustment layers in between the Color mode layers to mainly played with the hues until I found a colour scheme I liked. For this first image I used the opportunity to play a bit with the brushes I have in my folders, hence all the shapes you can see across the image. To end, I used several photos to give the trees and ground some texture. Normally I don't leave the photos as they are, I set them in Overlay/Soft Light  mode (depends), click on the Lock Transparent Pixels icon for that layer, and paint over it with a textured brush. That way you don't just have the image sitting just there, but your version of the image, which I find fits better. Last, I did the light coming from the gate. To made it,  I simple drew an ellipse in a separate layer set above everything else, motion blur it, and set the layer to Soft Light to finish.

Any questions or comments are always welcomed.

Fan Art Challenge: The Crow

I am taking part in another one of 3DTotal Challenges. The Challenge this time is called Fan Art. I have decided to go for the main character in the film The Crow. The competition finishes by the end of April. This is where I am at the moment with my concept. You can find a better quality image at the thread itself at the 3DTotal pages where I am publishing my progress, and if you feel like it, please go on and comment, either there or here.

You can also visit my personal web pages where more information and steps taken to produce this concept image are available.

Thanks!

Welcome to my Blog

Welcome to this blog. I will be using these pages to display some of my digital art as well as comment on anything I find online related to digital art. 

You can also visit my personal web pages where more information and more work is available.