Trueblood's Plight Cover

I have been very busy in the artwork these past few months. Summer is a bad time for me for painting, as I have had both children home and doing anything around playing referee is impossible. But I have recently completed the cover art for an upcoming book by Nicole Thomas who's blog is located here: http://alyiakallen.blogspot.com/


I am very happy to have worked with her on this project, and would do so again in a heartbeat in the future. The work on this piece was extensive and quite a few major edits were made, but let me post some work in progress shots and such so as to see how I go about my painting process. As you can see here the lighting and general form are loosely blocked in. This is an important part to my painting as it lets me get the lighting and perspective down before I get into any real intensive detailing. I chose a warm palette for this painting as I wanted to portray the time of day as late late afternoon, almost to dusk.

The second image shows that I have done more detailing on the far background and the midground, as well as beginning to define the feather details on the gryphon's wings and body. You will notice that there are several major changes between this image here and the following ones, as I realized that there were some major anatomy and perspective errors that were pointed out by several people.

This is an in-between view while I was making the changes. This is one beauty about digital artwork, the ability to move things around if needed. Things that need to be changed are the head/face/ear placement, tail and ass-half, and the near foreleg. The next image will reflect the changes, and I was in agreement that they were needed. Up until this point I was not totally satisfied by the way it was turning out. I was happy with the rocks though, as this was a breakthrough for me as far as background painting went. I have always had trouble with rocks and stones.

Between the last image and this image there have been some major changes. I realigned the face/eyes, enlarged the hindquarters and moved the placement for her tail. I also blocked in the basic shadows and did some refining work on the big rock in the foreground, along with the far background. This is the point where it started to really come together for me, but there was still something missing from the background. Enter, the other gryphons. The image is more or less complete at this point here. I painted the other two gryphons in the background to provide balance, but we are still not completely done. A critique from a good artist friend pointed out that the moon and stars were detracting from the image, and that moons have mass. Silly me didn't pay attention and put a star right in the middle of where the moon would be. The background was still bugging me too, there was an element missing, and I realized that the stones on the left cut off to abruptly and needed something to bring them out and lighten them up a touch.




And the finished painting. The clouds in the sky behind the main character were refined and detailed more. The moon and stars were removed and I agree it is a much cleaner presentation this way. The position of the white gryphon in the far background was changed, I moved him/her close to where the back of the book will be. The background was refined even more, and a subtle golden glow was added with an airbrush. The rocks were also figured out, I added some grass and foliage to them, and that lightened it up considerably, and got rid of that blackened pit that was taking attention away from the gryphons themselves. Final highlights and shadows were added. Over all I am extremely pleased with this painting. I learned a lot of things in the process and am intending on applying that knowledge to future paintings.

Here are some detail shots of the gryphons. This whole painting was worked on with Photoshop CS, Painter IX, and a Wacom Intuos 4 Graphics tablet. Working resolution was at 600dpi, 7800 x 5100 pixels.

Chasing the Sky - WIP

Medium: Painter IX, Photoshop CS + Wacom Intuos 2 Graphics tablet. Tools: Soft Oil Pastel, Smear blender brush, Airbrush. Photoshop was used to reposition layers.

Lately I've been crazy with the holidays, but I have been slowly working on a digital piece that was commissioned back in the summer. When I start a digital piece, I do it one of two ways. I draw out the image on actual paper and then refine and finally scan it, or I just start drawing directly on the computer. With this piece, you can see that the latter method is the one that I chose for this particular piece. I made a gradient background to tentatively mark out where the light will be coming from, and to get the mood for the image started from step one.


I made some significant changes here since the original sketch was done. I changed the angle on the dragon to the far right, as well as the one on the bottom. Something about the sketch didn't look quite right to me so I made the adjustments while I was still early on in the process. I also blocked in the basic colors and shading that will be refined further into the painting process. I also changed the format of the painting to a more horizontal layout. At this point, I need to define where my lighting is going to be coming from, in this case is is going to be from the lower right corner.



I made some further adjustments to the pose of the dragon in the lower left, I didn't like the way the wings were positioned, and repainted it to sit behind him like shown. I also messed with the dragon on the top left, changing the position of the wings after looking at references for bats and how they look when they fly.

I have also roughed in the background, and done some detailing to the sky, and added in the tops of trees/bushes in the lower right hand to give it a sense of space/perspective.


I took a break from this piece for about a month due to the holiday rush at my other job, and after coming back to it I did some more refining work on the red dragon specifically, adding in the stronger shading to start the detailing that will eventually lead to the finished product.

There are arrows originating from the lower right corner, marking where my light source is coming from, and aiding me in keeping the lighting and shadows consistent throughout the piece. This will help when trying to figure out where shadows will be thrown and where they will end up. I also do not work on any one specific part of the painting at any one time, but more around with where I'm concentrating on. This helps to keep the painting together, avoiding having one section be "more finished" than the rest. At this point in the painting, you should have your anatomy and position more or less finalized, because the next step is starting to add in all the small details and fixing things at that point becomes a real chore.
And that brings me to where I have left off as of yesterday.
I used Photoshop to set my lighting guides layer to screen, so it would not interfere with my work but was still visible over the painting itself.

The red dragon and the blue dragon got some detailing and refining, I painted in the spines on the backs, and started to be nit-picky about detailing at this point. The next step after this is adding in the scale details, and adding the final highlights and shadows. I do not use black when I paint, but I try more to use a dark version of the complementary colors in the subject, ie. red/green, blue/orange, and purple/yellow. Warm light casts cool shadows, cool light tends to cast warmer shadows. In this piece we have more of a warm lighting mood, due to the oranges in the sky from the sunset. Therefore my shadows have more of a purple/bluish tone to them than they would at say dawn or mid-day.

Cool colors include, blue, green, violet, blue-violet.
Warm colors are reds, oranges, orange-yellows, and red-violet. Purple is a fun color to shade with as it can be either a warm or a cool color.
We will cover highlights in a future entry.