Painting Reason

Here are a few images showing my process through the final I Robot: Reason painting. In this specific case, I tried something a little different than my usual approach. I've started to have my pencil sketches scanned and printed directly onto canvas. This has saved me a good amount of time. I'm not having to transfer my final pencil sketch by hand. I previously would either use a sheet of graphite paper to hand trace the drawing or I would project the image onto the canvas and retrace. Either way was time consuming and I wouldn't get all the details that are in my final pencils. This new process saves me time and I have an exact copy of my drawing on the canvas. In this case, I had my digital value study printed onto the canvas. I'm not sure I will continue transferring the value study because I did lose some of the detail from the drawing.

Once I stretch my canvas onto a board I will apply a thin wash of color to give me a middle value base to work from. I still did the wash first even though I had the grey values on the canvas. I felt the surface needed an oil base so I did the wash with a mixture of ultramarine blue and burnt umber. I find this combination to give me a nice neutral base that I can shift cooler or warmer as needed. For this painting I added dioxazine purple to the washes. This is under the area of the light source. I placed the complementary color to try and activate the yellow paint by having some of the purple show through.

I have been trying to loosen up with my paint application. The difference is visible in this piece if you compare it to the Secret of Cavern's Keep or Cloudskimmer artwork. I have also started working on the main figure here before painting in the whole background. I'm hoping that by having the important elements with a full range of values that I will be able to soften up the values in the background on the less important elements.

This last image shows the finished painting still taped on the board. I will usually let the piece rest for a couple of days like this. I get the chance to review it and maybe add in some minor adjustments before pulling it off the board.

Process

This is the first blog post under my revised portfolio website. I wanted to talk a bit about my working process and show some examples. This post shows you the preliminary steps for my current painting in progress, I Robot: Reason. I will be adding the final image once the painting is done.

First there are the thumbnails. Many, many thumbnails. 

I usually do a lot of sketching at this point. This is where I do most of my thinking. I try to get a lot of ideas down to work out the best image for the story. From here I will pick out my favorites and start cleaning up the sketch and figuring out the image details.

I started the final pencil drawings for this illustration several times. The drawing just wasn't coming out the way I envisioned it so I started over a few times.

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At one point, the sketching was going so poorly that I decided to take a step back. I felt I needed to take some reference photos to help me get the right pose for the main figure. Spiderman was happy to help me out here. I posed Spidey and took a bunch of photos to work from. The final sketch worked out to my satisfaction after having the reference shots.

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Once I have the final sketch drawn out I will typically scan this in and do some studies digitally. I have gotten into the habit of creating a comprehensive value study. This way I know exactly where I want all the light and darks to go. I usually will also do a color study in Photoshop. Working digitally allows me to try different color schemes very quickly. 

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This shows you my pre-painting process. Once I'm comfortable with the up-front work, I will transfer the drawing to canvas and start painting the illustration in oils. I will continue to show this process in a new post where I will show in progress images of the painting.