Introduction

Over the years I’ve received numerous questions about how I work.   So after putting this off for many years, I finally decided to stitch together a step-by step “how to” that shows in fairly good detail how I work towards a final color piece.  Personally, I don’t believe I have much to teach on the subject, as I'm still learning myself, but I do love to see other people’s step-by-step guides, so, hey, why not do one myself? You can use the text links at the top and bottom of the page to navigate the different How To Pages.  Each of the illustrations in these pages will open in a new window, so feel free to load them up as you read.  Finally, I put together two animated "time lapse" images at the end of the guide.  Have fun!

Philosophy
You won’t find any filters here, no tricks on how to make a custom brush that will paint hair or light rays or any of that.  My philosophy for digital painting is to keep it simple -  to use the basic tools to paint as I would on real canvass or illustration board.  I don’t employ many tricks or shortcuts, except perhaps when it comes to color.  As matter of fact, I generally stick with methods that I know work in real life, translated to the digital medium, and only rely on the computer to adjust and tweak things here or there after the fact.  I hope the resulting work is natural looking and feels like it has a personal style, not cobbled together from common filters and effects.

Gray Under-Painting
I’ve always had a problem with color.  I have two different kinds of colorblindness that affect me to one degree or another and this has always made me second guess myself when it came to putting brush on paper.  How can you really start to paint light and shadow when you’re afraid that the color you’re about to use is possibly completely wrong?  The age of digital painting changed that somewhat, as I could at least adjust color, albeit painstakingly, later.  But it wasn’t until I started painting with gray undertones a few years ago that I truly found myself liberated from such worries and able to concentrate on just learning how to paint form.  And the technique isn’t a digital one - It’s one I learned from watercolor and gouache painting, but I didn’t always realize that it could be done even better in the digital realm.

It’s pretty simple:  Paint the picture in grays.  When you’ve got a gray image that you're happy with, you go back in and layer over it with translucent washes of color, building the final layers of color over one another to achieve the final look.  Of course, in the digital world, I can do the same thing, but I can use layers in Photoshop set to modes like Color, and Adjustment Layers such as Gradient Fill to achieve the same effects as a translucent color wash on a real canvass. 

Overnight I went from dreading to sit down and start a piece to a liberated work ethic. With color out of the equation it was like removing a whole dimension of complications, allowing me to experiment, loosen up and try new approaches.   Now I sit down with relish to work on a new piece, feverishly roughing in the light and shadow and having a great deal of fun. 

What a difference it makes.

Time
For this piece I worked over several weeks to finish it, but only working a few days here or there, bouncing to other projects then coming back later to take a fresh look.  The drawing took a couple days to get tweaked out of my sketch book, and an afternoon to finally finish off.  Painting the gray tones took about an afternoon to get it somewhere to around Stage 09.  Then another afternoon to finalize the grays and add some color, around Stage 12.  Finally, it’s about another afternoon’s worth of work to get to the final piece.  Most of the time was spent in painting the grays, then cleaning up the final details. 

Tools
For the sketches and drawing I use a Staedtler Mars-780 mechanical pencil on sketchbook and bristol paper.   Everything after that stage is done digitally with a combination of Photoshop 7.0 (gotta upgrade) and Painter 9.5 along with a large Wacom tablet.  Photoshop and Painter both have their strong points.  Painter is excellent at, well, painting, especially if you want natural brushes.  It also has the ability to quickly rotate the canvass in real time as you work, making for a natural painting experience that can't be beat.  Photoshop's strengths lie in its editing tools, allowing for fast and accurate coloring, finishing touches and superior file management.

On the computer side of things, I'm working on a Dell Dimension 8400 with Pentium a 4 3.0 GHz CPU and 1 Gig of RAM.  OS is Windows XP Professional.

Okay, let's move on to the next page and see how it all starts.