Commissioned for Azmidiske at the Forums of Loathing.

The request was of her sexy red-headed, double sword wielding warrior, and seeing as how it has been close to a year since I’ve done anything too intensive, I was happy to oblige. Done in Photoshop.

Some discussion at the forums resulted in me writing a short summary of the techniques and workflow I used to finish this piece. One of the first, and probably the worst, mistake I made was the fact that I haphazardly merged all my black & white layers before starting on the color portion of the artwork. As a result, the piece took longer than I would have liked, due to the fact that I had to repaint many of the detailed areas and edges of the figure.

Hit the jump for the short tutorial guide I made in response to the painting, as well as some bonus links to the original black and white template I based the finished piece on, as well as a detailed look at the hair.

Basic technique: I use the brush tool religiously. While it took longer than I hoped, not too much testing of patience was required once I got my brush settings just right. I’m using an old Graphire 2 from WAAAAY back in the day, with a taped-up pen. (half of it slipped off).

The black and white template was drawn with a 100% opacity hard edge brush around 13px. I trimmed the lines with a hard edge eraser until the lineart looked neat.

For the shading aspects, my brush settings were: 100% Opacity 75% Flow, Airbrush, Pen Pressure assigned to Size AND Opacity, and a large size (~80). Assigning pressure to opacity is probably the secret to shading – it allows you to really blend the colors by slowly working it into the picture, as opposed to putting it on with a soft edged brush. I slowly dropped the size to smaller measurements for more detailed blending areas.

For the background “texture” and fine tuning the skin, I used a Spatter typed brush- it gives more life to a drawing by working in it’s unique texture. At 100%, it allows that spongy background look. Setting your opacity lower (to around 30%) with pen pressure assigned to opacity allows you to fine tune your blending, as well as providing a brushstroke “texture” for the skin. Spatter-style brushes really add life to a piece. Just don’t overdo it!

As for the workflow: I start with the black and white template, and on the same layer, I start to paint in the skin portions by gobbing on a medium base color between the lines. I blended in darker shades for shadows, and a little bit of highlight. I then erased and/or reblended the hard black lines into the shading. (For this particular picture I used shades of gray for the skin at first, and then hue/saturated in the color).

In short – I painted over my lineart. This allows you to incorporate the definition the B&W template has into the shaded patches of skin, giving you that pseudo-realistic look.

Hair was done by painting the darkest tone first, the layering on lighter tones, smudging, dark tone, light tone, smudging, rinse & repeat, all the while switching to a smaller brush size and keeping with the flow of the hair. The several final passes was with a hard-edged spatter-style brush at high opacity, and then detailing with several passes of little 1px individual hair strands. The fringes of the hair were done with a high opacity soft-edged brush to make it more realistic.

As for color: I’m color-blind, no joke . I used outside reference for skin/hair tones, and the rest I color-balanced constantly. It was pretty frustrating to get some of the colors right, and I bugged my roommate several times about the hue of the skin. The background colors are just me playing with the preset palette and spatter brush on low opacity :]

3rd commission thus far for Nuurgle. Posted on the Kingdom of Loathing forums. Enjoy.

(click to enlarge)

2nd commission thus far for Voivod. Posted on the Kingdom of Loathing forums. Enjoi.

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

A little something I commissioned for myself as a small project. For those of you not familiar with Kingdom of Loathing, it’s a neat web-based RPG by Asymmetric Publications with quite a large user base. All in-game graphics are drawn stick-figure style, and are pretty charming when coupled with a humorous plotline. A great time waster, and addicting to say the least.