The Second Mouse Digital Painting, Vin

So for my second digital mouse painting I decided to start with a drawing of a character from a book, as suggested by my brother. The book in particular is part of a trilogy by Brandon Sanderson called the Mistborn series. And the character of the books that I drew is the main protagonist heroine called Vin.

Just briefly for some context, I'll describe without going into too much fantasy detail. Our character Vin, lives in a land shrouded in mist. Some people are born with special abilities which basically lets them control metal for different functions. Vin can control all of them, people like her are called Mistborn and they propel themselves through the lands and cities by propulsion of metal. Their signature mark is their Mistborn cloaks. There, that's the easiest I can sum up the basic premise of the picture (and story)!

Anyhoo, I liked the idea of this drawing because I knew it would be more challenging than my previous digital painting. To start, it's based on a human figure, an area of art where I find myself weaker at. Second of all, the clothing and poses of the character in particular are quite elegant and ethereal as described in the books. The cloak in particular is described as ragged and long with ends like tendrils of silk metal. And third of all I was impatient to start so the drawing itself ended up quite basic in comparison to the finished product:

Original Drawing

However I went ahead and started even though I felt the drawing didn't exactly capture what I wanted. I started with the skin tones; in the original picture the moon was behind Vin but I quickly realised that that would mean I would be silhouetting her, thus leaving out detail and making the picture quite muddy:

Starting with the skin, and the moonlight has moved to the top left.

So I moved the moon to the top left corner, out of sight and decided that it would be represented with a glow. This made plotting out the colouring process much easier and allowed me to practice lighting the face and arms with greater definition. After some time I was pleased enough with the facial features, they were slightly Neanderthal but hey, it's all a learning curve for figure drawing right? Her clothing came out better than I expected with multiple layers (literally layers in Photoshop) applied until it began to look natural and have depth. However the main challenge was on the horizon, the tendrils of the cloak:

The tendrils proved a tough one!

I'd I spent 60% of the time on this digital painting making sure I managed to make these look as good as possible. In the end I didn't get the exact look I wanted but there was definition and fluidity there; I was happy with. So I took the stance of "it ain't broke, don't fix it" for fear that I may end up trying to improve things but end up making irreparable damage (and undoing all of that time I spent working on them!):

Tendrils, Check!

So with that the rest of the digital painting began to fall into place easier. The brunt of the work was figuring out the tones and colours, and then also capturing the look of the tendrils on the cloak. It proved a pain in the ass achieving primarily the second of the two, but it paid off as I was basically in the home stretch. I began filling out the legs and second arm, these proved less difficult and after the amount of time shading, erasing and altering the cloak, the legs and arm were naturally much easier to do. After another short amount of time I had them set in place and only came back to them to make minor shading adjustments:

All in place, this gurl need her hair done!

So with that, the only final piece in this character painting was doing her hair. This proved once again a little more difficult as I had opted to go with black hair. This meant harder shading in relation to the light and it was also an effect in digital painting I hadn't encountered yet. After a brief tutorial and setting up the right "brush" for the job I managed to capture a look I liked trying to make it appear as natural as possible. I don't think the final look of the hair is perfect by any means, there's certainly a lot of problems with it but I was pleased with my first effort.

As with my previous painting (I had finished the central character/subject of the picture), all that was left was the background. And as with the previous digital painting I opted to change to a more simple background than was initially planned. In the original drawing I quickly scribbled in some buildings rising out of the mist as the character is primarily based in a city in the books. However I decided that I didn't have the knowhow or time to starting painting buildings digitally (yet!) so I took a more simple ethereal approach: mist! With that said and done, I wanted to make it swirl downwards and have it enveloping the world below Vin, like it had a life of its own. It clings on to Vin as she launches above it and you can see some lights glowing on the land far below.

In the end I think the effect I wanted to give this picture was the character blissfully breaking away into the freedom of the moonlight from her misty world below, almost as if it is soothing her and letting all her worries drift away. The final picture I think is an improvement on my skills from the previous Water Dragon picture. And while I can certainly see a multitude of problems such as disproportionate parts of Vin, not entirely natural posing and some odd shading/lighting (amongst a multitude of other things), I'm very happy with the final result. One problem I plan to rectify in my next panting is to make it less soft. It wasn't intended in this picture but thankfully it sort of lends itself to the atmosphere, I think!

Vin, Mistborn - Final Picture

So that's number two in the bag and another for the portfolio. If you've read this far I'd also like to say that if you ever need help with something along this line of work I'd be happy to lend a hand. For my next painting it will be a Game of Thrones picture, fan fiction of Danaerys and Drogon, and don't worry it won't be spoilerish. It will be an entirely made up scenario! And if you've made it THIS far into the blog, thank you for taking your time to read about my adventures in digital painting!

Until next time, CAOI BEETCHES!

My First Foray into the World of Digital Painting

So in the last few months I decided to embrace some of my very few talents. As of lately I've taken up painting again. I'll post the two I have done in a later post but more recently again I've also decided to enter the realm of Digital Painting. I had always been daunted by this medium as there is such lavishly detailed pictures floating around the net, each with unique, colourful and wonderful styles that I felt I could never achieve such a sense of detail and awe so many of them inspire. That and I only have a meagre mouse instead of a tablet.

But I decided against my pessimism and pushed forward to give it a try! After a few brief tutorials on colour theory and which software proved popular for this sort of endeavour I picked out an old picture I drew in my transition year of secondary school:

-Transition Year Drawing

So with Photoshop in tow, I began to colour in the drawing, using all the techniques I had obtained from previous tutorials. In the beginning I wasn't very pleased with the early results. Without the drawing overlaid, the colours underneath had very little shape or form, appeared blunt and didn't have any sense of the detail the drawing did.

- Phase 1: The nearly giving up phase.

Around this time is usually where my old self would have given up. I don't know where I developed it but over the years I had a bad habit of expecting immediate results and submitting to defeat too easily. And I nearly did here too. But I pressed on. And on, and on. And then something wonderful happened. I was learning to use tools of the program outside of the tutorials, I was losing track of time and most of all I was enjoying it. And when you spend enough time doing the things you enjoy it becomes a labour of love with results that could possibly exceed what you initially planned. Such was my luck in this case. I learnt the virtue of patience all over again and it was paying off:

- Phase 2: Wait, what? This is sort of cool!

At this stage I was enormously pleased with myself. I was liking the look more than the original drawing and I had learnt vast amounts about digital painting. All because I actually had patience and took the time to do it. The funny thing is that, apart from having to draw the subject at hand, the colouring part is not that difficult once you get the theory down and have a bit of knowhow about light and shadow. And even in those regards I'm a beginner at best. But with Photoshop you have all the tools you could need to perfect and fine tune things right down to a small shadow, coarse skin or whatever effect you're trying to achieve. It just takes patience and time!

In the end the final product didn't stick exactly to the original picture plan. I altered the background slightly as I DID spend probably around 6-8 hours colour the picture over the course of time. I felt that I could do a quick fix for the background. But funnily enough the background which honestly took about 15-20 mins max ended up blending well with the picture. I feel like I should take credit for achieving the look of it, but honestly it was literally down to another thing I learnt with my first digital painting. Experimentation. By pure blind luck of testing the use of a few tools of Photoshop I stumbled across a background that is simply but compliments the "Water Dragon" I had created. The end result was this:

- Final Digital Painting "Water Dragon"

Simple background, all from messing about. Mind you that won't always provide results, but now I know how to get THAT result if I ever intend to use it again! In the end I think I can say I pulled off a good first digital painting. Of course, I wanted to show it off and have since been recommended to get  a tablet for drawing, which I do believe could greatly improve the time I spend on each one. Overall though the sense of achievement was something I haven't felt in a while and I hope this is the first of many I plan to post in the future.

So to close, for anyone who is intimidated about learning to digital paint, don't be. Like all things it takes time but you'll be surprised about how quick you can adapt. Get Photoshop or Corel, scan in your images and starting painting, you'll enjoy it, you'll get really pissed off and you'll be proud!

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And here's a little sneak peak of the next one for anyone interested. It's based off a character called Vin from a book called the Mistborn trilogy. You may have to look her up to get the context of the picture but I'm hoping it will look cool none the less in the end, even for those who have no idea what the hell is going on in the picture: