Achieving a more painterly style!

I've been wanting to change my work up a little for a while now and introduce more of a painterly look to my final pieces. I'll be honest and admit I spent a long time avoiding this because I wasn't sure exactly how to do it and didn't want to look like a failure. This is not exactly the best way to think as there is no right way, all you can do is learn and apply, the more you practice something the better, things will go wrong and that's okay. Once I reminded myself of this I knew I needed to lean into my strengths and use those to influence my process and introduce some new techniques and workflows in smaller chunks.

The past couple of years especially have been pretty crazy for me life wise, I’ve moved house twice and started teaching Concept Art which has involved me constantly learning new skills and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I feel like because I’ve been quite focused on becoming the best educator I can be, I lost quite a bit of who I am, particularly as an artist. I used to find a lot of fun in creating and designing creatures especially and over the past couple of years, I’ve definitely not found as much time to be able to do that. I got the opportunity this year to teach on a module involving some creature design and decided to do some of the brief along with the students. So I thought it would be fun to talk through some of the design work I did for one of the creature variations along with how I achieved a bit more of a painterly style in my work for this one! This project is about 80% complete as I still have one variation of the creature left to do, so I’ll save that for another post and talk about the design process of the project as a whole!

The first things first, I had to work out what my limitations were and what elements I needed to aim for within the design, so breaking down the brief and making some notes is always what I’ll start with. To sum it up, I knew I needed to design a treasure guardian boss that is large and imposing, with strong ties to their surroundings. I hadn’t had chance to design the world for this creature, but I knew I essentially wanted to design a pirate shark boss by the end!

I’ll often go off at this point to do some studies of real world animals, in particular the animals I intend to use to inspire the anatomy for my creature. I’ve done lots of studies of sharks so I didn’t feel I needed to put quite as much time into that, but I did dedicate a couple of evenings into some gorilla studies. Once I’ve completed sketches of the reference quite closely, that’s when I tend to start sketching ideas inspired more by my own style and ideas.

It’s at this stage that I have a fairly good base idea of what the anatomy will be like and I can start to generate some ideation. At this stage I try not to limit myself too much, exploring different options and not stopping just because I like an idea. The main thing I’m trying to focus on at this point is trying to find something interesting whilst still making sure I’m hitting the points described in the brief.

I’ll usually spend the most time in this stage, exploring ideas, analysing what works, what doesn’t and why, and then searching for new ideas keeping any points I’ve made in mind.  I find this a really effective way to work as I’m always getting closer to what I’m aiming for and understanding exactly what elements I want to maintain or change throughout the process.

I’ll go into more depth of the design process in a later blog post when I talk about the whole project, so let’s talk a bit about the rendering process for this one seeing as I tried something different!

First up was obviously the final sketch and then the linework using a brush that has tapering, some pressure opacity and a slight texture. Next I work on the flats underneath the lines, the majority of the flats are all on separate layers for each element, clipped (with a clipping mask) to a flat of the whole design on the bottom. At this point, I don’t get too tied into colours, I just get something down and adjust as I go, this guy actually started out much darker and greener than his colour in the end! 

To start adding form to the design, I add another layer on top of my flats but clipped to them and set it to multiply. Using a desaturated, fairly light purple I’ll then start painting in any shadow areas with the lasso tool to make a selection, and an airbrush to paint in the shadow. I tend to do this with 2 or 3 layers in order to have areas of much darker shadows too, especially for ambient occlusion! To add lighting in to this piece, I duplicated all of my flats, flattened them, brought it above the shadow layer, clipped it and set it to ‘Add’ under layer modes. The important thing to do next is to add a layer mask (the little rectangle with a circle under layers), fill the mask with black, and then paint back in your light with white. This is something I’d not tried before and I didn’t pull it off exactly how I would have liked, but I’m glad I tried it!

The majority of this so far has been following the process I tend to use all of the time in my work as it is easy for me to follow and get to a good rendered standard within my work fairly quickly, but I wanted to move away from this a little. It’s at this stage that I knew I had all of the important information there and the bits where my strengths lie, so 80% of the work was done, and now I could experiment. I knew I wanted to keep my lines and some of the graphic shapes within my rendering style so this is something I kept in mind. 

I added a new layer on top of everything (including my lines) and started to paint on top with a bit of a textured brush (I did add some colour adjustment layers beforehand). Again, the majority of the work was already done, so all I hard to do was colour pick and blend where I felt I could either improve detail or paint areas of detail out to break it up. I kept repeating this, consistently asking myself which bits looked a bit off and how I could paint over them to make them feel right. I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to start out a certain way to get a more painterly style, and it definitely wasn’t like this. However, I’m really glad I did lean into my strengths and let that enable me to experiment more, achieving a result I’m really happy with and will likely introduce a lot more of into my work. You can see the whole project over on my Artstation too - https://www.artstation.com/aldersaur

So if you’re feeling a little stagnant and want to try something new within your work, don’t try to do too much at once! You likely don’t need to change your whole process, especially if it’s because you’ve seen someone else working a certain way! Think about and list your strengths and consider how those can enable you to feel comfortable for most parts of the project whilst still enabling you to try something a little different in your work!