Prepared some process pics of a piece of card art. Thought to show it at MineCon, but it didn’t happen, so I’ll put it here instead. Disclaimer: Knowing I was making a process series, I was much more structured than usually, so this isn’t 100% reflecting how I do art. There is no formula, only a bunch of “This seems to work sometimes” kinda tips.

1. Character design by @bomuboi, it’s a “Festering Freak”, a truly disgusting decay creature in the next set.

Roughly sketching where stuff goes according to my first idea of it:

2. Line drawing:

3. Darkened the background to a light mid tone. Adding the first shadows. Trying to imagine where they would fall if the light was a fairly diffused straight down light in a foggy swamp.

4. Highlights. There are several layer blending modes you can try for adding shadows/highlights/color in Photoshop.

5. Color layer. Using a new layer set to ‘overlay’.

5.1. You can be pretty sloppy with colors here. Line art will sort out the edges. Colors only:

6. A new layer set to multiply to deepen the darkest shadows.

7. Adjusting overall contrast with a “levels” adjustment layer.

8. Start painting out teh sketchy lines with a new layer on top. Smoothing some of the gradients. Slapping some stuff in the background to give the impression of an environment. Low contrast, because you shouldn’t look too hard at it. Added a rim-light to separate the leftmost arm from background. Also change the hand so it is easier to understand what’s going on.

9. Sharpening some edges, blurring others. Sharpness and contrast draws the eye, so that goes where you want the viewer to focus.

10. Adding some atmosphere with a soft brush. The feeling of air does a lot for the depth of a picture, and also further reduce contrast in the far areas.

11. Final adjustments. Upping contrast and putting a “spotlight” on the character with a blurry “overlay” layer, adding both shadow and light.

Summing up: What you’re trying to do here is to break up the task in manageable chunks. Trying to handle line, form, color, light, and edges all at once can melt your brain.

But what you’re actually doing all the time, is with one brushstroke at a time (there will probably be several hundred, up to thousands of brushstrokes in a painting), figuring out what you can do to incrementally improve your picture.

May you freaks fester merrily!

/carnalizer