Thought I would share a few screen captures from an image I have been working on to show a little bit of my process for concept work. I will do a more detailed explanation of the technical side of the process in a new post as there is a lot to cover! but for now enjoy the screenshots.
Any question feel free to leave a comment or email me!
Ok, so when I sat down for this image all I had in mind was that the subject was going to be a character design and he would be "brute" archetype.
Starting with thumbnail sketches I start to explore silhouette and shape design, I use a heavily textured brush to keep the shapes random and interesting, it also ends up working as the skin texture later on too!
These sketches are rough, its not about details at this stage, just a general "feel" for the design.
I end up picking the thumbnail far left on the middle row, to me it has a look of a great white shark with some sort of weaponry and this appeals to me as a fun design to work up.
I rez up the the thumbnail to about 4000 pixels in a new file.
Using the same heavy textured brush from the thumbnails I start to refine the shapes a little more, I work zoomed out still, but try to make sense of the shapes I see to inform a design for what I see as armour. I start thinking of this guys character as I refine the shapes, I see him being a hulking brute, not too intelligent but still self motivated in his intensions, more like muscle for hire than a mindless beast.
I get to a point where I can start to see the direction the design is going in, I feel pretty confident about it at this point so decided to start adding colour. I make a new layer, set it to "colour" and lay in some very broad strokes of the basic colours I am thinking of.
"color" layers are great for this as they do not affect the values you already have, they just add colour to them, also with them being on a separate layer you can constantly adjust them without destroying the image!
With the basic colours laid in, I start to paint opaquely on top with a new layer set to "normal" I colour pick from the image itself and start to use the values in the image to refine forms and start to block out the weaponry, this stage is really fun to do, everything you need is in the viewfinder so its really quick. time to get some music on and get into the painting. I keep thinking of the character as I do this, adding details that tell a story about him and his experiences, scratches and cuts, scars and dinks in the armour all adding to the believability.
Right now I am pretty into the image and decide to take it further as a design and incorporate a bit more of a scene/stage for the character, this is not something I would normally do for a character design but I got really into the image and so went with it.
I open new layer, set it to "multiply" and fill it with a dark value grey, close to black. I then mask the layer and begin erasing out my "lights", this gives me a really quick way to try out lots of lighting ideas without to much effort or destruction to the image, multiply basically works like a dimmer switch, it makes the image darker and then you can erase it back to get the image underneath to show through. its a quick trick but super effective.
From here its plain sailing, lots of background elements to work on and general painting all over the image to refine forms and design. I have a few more things I am going to add to the image to finish it, but its almost there. I will do a future post about the technical aspects and finishing touches.
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