Retrace Your Steps

Although I can't show you the changes I made to my actual design during the painting process, I can walk you through my general painting process from start to finish, thanks to the amount of layers I used.

Step One:

So here is just the basic line-work for an athletic human male. (Reference was used from Google Images, by simply searching 'Male Body Model', I'm not going to upload it due to the amount of printscreens this post will receive!). A lot of people I've seen paint prefer not to use such dark line-work, or at least go out of their way to hide it up later, but I kinda like it, and think it may become part of my style (I hope that's not a problem?).

Step Two:

Here I went ahead and blocked in the skin colour, with minor tone around the abdominal & pectoral muscles. I didn't want to spend too much time refining muscle tone because I was in the mindset that my conceptual character could afford to be really loose. I used a custom made scale pallet (Shown in the top right) to create tone; a good tip to find a darker shade of your base colour is to colour pick the sections your skin crosses over your line work.

Step Tree:

Here I went ahead and added the line-work for some character detail. The mistake I've made in the past, was accidentally adding tone and shading to my line-work before I've started painting, so everything has either come out a lot darker than I intended, or would be completely erased by the layer on top of it, rendering the time spent very pointless.

Step Four:

Same process as step two, only this time I was colouring the clothing etc. You may also notice the skin colour gets a little bit lighter. I asked a few friends for their opinions, and they said that he looked a tiny bit too dark to look Native American, so I edited the Brightness in the image properties.

Step Five:

You may not even notice the difference here, but I found the left side of his body too bare with the sash & arm band both taking part on the right side, so I decided to give him a tattoo. This tattoo was actually taken from a Native American pottery design I found whilst doing my research, and thought it would look pretty nice as a body decal.

Step Six:

It may be a little hard to see, but at this stage I decided it was time to give him some hair. I started by lightly laying down the base shape in line form, ready to be painted.

Step Seven:

I made a new layer ready to start practising the hair method I showcased in the last post (Which I was pleasantly surprised with for my first attempt). This was probably the longest part of the process, but that may be due to my inexperience, I'm not too sure.

Step Eight:

Basically Step Seven but rinsed and repeated until I was left with a full head of hair. As the hair 'strands', were created with a 90% opacity brush, the scalp was still showing through, so I simply made another layer below all the hair and blocked in a solid mid-tone beneath it to cover up the skin.

Step Nine:

I finally finished up by adding colour to his eyes, and giving him some bloody face paint just to break up the boring expression.