HOME | DD

Description
Just thought I would upload my steps for the Jinx painting. Original Full Sized Painting: fav.me/d6r4tdr

Here is some explanation of the steps:

1. Rough sketch
- Just get the general composition down. I don't worry about having clean lines since they will be removed eventually to be replaced with tone.

2. Block in Masks
- I do this for almost everything I paint these days. I find it helps to have 100% opaque masks on seperate layers of the major shapes in your painting. So skin gets 1 layer, hair another, etc. It just makes painting a lot easier because I can select one of these layers and "paint inside the lines" which maintains edges and reduces the cleanup.

3. Render basic values:
- It's easier to paint greyscale first so you only have to worry about values. I use an airbrush for most of this stage because it lets me get a large range of values quickly. I also make us of the masks from the previous step and use a technique with the lasso tool + painting on different layers. Basically you can paint a large stroke and have it bleed into other unwanted areas, but just erase the parts you don't need. It's a quick way to build up values. Since there ends up being a lot of layers, I put them into a group and merge the group after I finish this step (but I still keep the mask layers in a seperate group).

4. Rendering More
- At this point you should be able to remove lineart and it looks good. Just paint more tight details like the face and harden some of the soft edges from the airbrush. I use a basic round brush for this.

5. Rendering brush marks
- I use some texture brushes to add little details. Probably can't tell with this painting unless you had to high res file. It adds a little bit of polish though. I also finish rendering pretty much to finished levels, now it just needs some color!

6. Monochrome
- I create a layer set to color and use a desaturated cool color since it's the overall effect I want to create. You need this color layer before you can start adding the other colors to 1. unify them and 2. it's hard to add color on a pure greyscale image, but with a little color already, the colors seem to be more accurate.

7. Adding Color
- With this workflow, coloring is a process of building up different colors on multiple layers set to color to get a nice result. Even for this stage I'm using the masks from step 2 so I can isolate the skin, etc. Sometimes I feel like the contrast needs to be adjusted, so I will make a value brighter or darker, but in general if I did a good job with the values in stage 4&5 I won't have to worry about this here. You can experiment with different layers set to overlay or whatever, but try not to ruin the value relationships.

8. Clean Up
- sometimes there are details that you want to add at the very end or things you need to correct. I just make a new group for this on top of everything. I also add some special effects like blur, more lighting, change the background, etc. Anything to make you painting look the better. Since I had the character masked, I could select the mask and invert it so I can paint into the background. Add a watermark/signiture to finish it off!

This is just my process now, it could change in the future and it's probably not for everybody. But since it breaks each art problem into a seperate stage, it's an easy workflow to use for beginners to create good results. Just requires patience and some planning. You should also use reference too (of course). I took a bunch of screenshots from the cinematic and had some photographs to help me figure out the lighting and design. Anyway, hopefully this helps. If you have any questions or want to see how I have my layers set up, just ask in the comments and I'll try to get back to you.

Description
Just thought I would upload my steps for the Jinx painting. Original Full Sized Painting: fav.me/d6r4tdr

Here is some explanation of the steps:

1. Rough sketch
- Just get the general composition down. I don't worry about having clean lines since they will be removed eventually to be replaced with tone.

2. Block in Masks
- I do this for almost everything I paint these days. I find it helps to have 100% opaque masks on seperate layers of the major shapes in your painting. So skin gets 1 layer, hair another, etc. It just makes painting a lot easier because I can select one of these layers and "paint inside the lines" which maintains edges and reduces the cleanup.

3. Render basic values:
- It's easier to paint greyscale first so you only have to worry about values. I use an airbrush for most of this stage because it lets me get a large range of values quickly. I also make us of the masks from the previous step and use a technique with the lasso tool + painting on different layers. Basically you can paint a large stroke and have it bleed into other unwanted areas, but just erase the parts you don't need. It's a quick way to build up values. Since there ends up being a lot of layers, I put them into a group and merge the group after I finish this step (but I still keep the mask layers in a seperate group).

4. Rendering More
- At this point you should be able to remove lineart and it looks good. Just paint more tight details like the face and harden some of the soft edges from the airbrush. I use a basic round brush for this.

5. Rendering brush marks
- I use some texture brushes to add little details. Probably can't tell with this painting unless you had to high res file. It adds a little bit of polish though. I also finish rendering pretty much to finished levels, now it just needs some color!

6. Monochrome
- I create a layer set to color and use a desaturated cool color since it's the overall effect I want to create. You need this color layer before you can start adding the other colors to 1. unify them and 2. it's hard to add color on a pure greyscale image, but with a little color already, the colors seem to be more accurate.

7. Adding Color
- With this workflow, coloring is a process of building up different colors on multiple layers set to color to get a nice result. Even for this stage I'm using the masks from step 2 so I can isolate the skin, etc. Sometimes I feel like the contrast needs to be adjusted, so I will make a value brighter or darker, but in general if I did a good job with the values in stage 4&5 I won't have to worry about this here. You can experiment with different layers set to overlay or whatever, but try not to ruin the value relationships.

8. Clean Up
- sometimes there are details that you want to add at the very end or things you need to correct. I just make a new group for this on top of everything. I also add some special effects like blur, more lighting, change the background, etc. Anything to make you painting look the better. Since I had the character masked, I could select the mask and invert it so I can paint into the background. Add a watermark/signiture to finish it off!

This is just my process now, it could change in the future and it's probably not for everybody. But since it breaks each art problem into a seperate stage, it's an easy workflow to use for beginners to create good results. Just requires patience and some planning. You should also use reference too (of course). I took a bunch of screenshots from the cinematic and had some photographs to help me figure out the lighting and design. Anyway, hopefully this helps. If you have any questions or want to see how I have my layers set up, just ask in the comments and I'll try to get back to you.